There is an ongoing stigma around joining the trades and how they compare to traditional four-year universities. Becoming an apprentice and earning the right to be called a Journeyman or Superintendent provides years of career opportunities.
We are proud that we invest heavily in helping team members move through many job opportunities.
Tradespeople in our company have the opportunity to develop their careers and satisfy their personal goals. Here’s a list of trade and career opportunities our team members have succeeded in.
- Sales
- Estimating
- Project Management
- Riding Superintendents (leading an entire trade team)
- Superintendent
- Foreman (master tradesman)
We create opportunities for our team that allows them to make the career they want with skills they have mastered here at MSC.
Besides career development, the MSC family is a living testament to how you can create a career without a traditional four-year university. A few of the critical opportunities our trade development program provides are:
- Reduced Cost of Tuition
It’s no secret that the cost of traditional colleges continues to rise each year. To start, you’re spending more time in a conventional college setting, which means increased costs. According to Education Data Initiative, the average cost of a four-year college is $142,204. Comparatively, in those same four years, our tradespeople will have earned on average $144,880 during the same time frame and earned their designation of Journeyman.
- Time Spent in School
Benjamin Franklin once said that “time is money.” Unlike our trades development program, which focuses solely on your area of concentration, traditional colleges require a certain amount of general education courses geared towards comprehensive education with knowledge outside your desired field of study. These extra courses add time, increasing the costs for a traditional four-year college.
- Specific Vs. Broad
Like time spent in school, trade schools require less time to complete because they exclude the general education requirements and are geared toward helping you specialize in a specific area of expertise, thus making it a more particular type of education. Though traditional colleges provide leeway to explore different career avenues, Mechanical Systems Company’s floater program, Signing Day, offers similar opportunities. With this program, new employees spend three weeks in each department, learning about our different trades through training and hands-on experience. The floater program allows our team to experience each department and understand how each trade relates to one another while also gaining valuable knowledge from different team members. After testing each trade, new members decide where their passions, interests, and skills align.
- Job Security
While there are a lot of jobs that have good job security, trades typically rank very high in job security. According to Business Wire, trades are some of the only jobs that aren’t affected by economic downturns. This means that while other companies are having to lay off employees due to lost wages, trade careers are safe and steady and even consistently grow each year regardless of the state of the economy.
- Income and Salary
Some might believe that because learning a trade require less time and money to attend, the annual salaries won’t compare to those with a traditional four-year college degree. Specific careers like surgeons, CEOs of businesses and high-level attorneys will be the most lucrative, but many trades match or exceed conventional career paths. There are pros and cons to the traditional four-year university path and the trade school path, but it all boils down to what you want to do as a career.
At MSC, we even offer continuing education courses and training for our employees to further advance their knowledge and capabilities. As a family of professionals, we pride ourselves on providing our employees with the necessary tools and resources to reach their professional and personal goals. Ready to take your career to the next level? View our open positions and build your career with MSC today.
