Blue-collar jobs abound, but skilled workers hard to find

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: Rob Chermesino’s college-educated friends went into finance and sales. His fiancee is a meeting planner. Mr Chermesino picked up a wrench. After a restless year at Northeastern University, he left to earn a two-year degree in automotive technology from Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston in 1996. Now employed by Direct Tire & Auto Service here, the 29-year-old works on brakes, shocks, exhaust systems, and tune-ups.

“I’m the only one who works with my hands,” he said, opening grease-coated palms as an air gun shrieked, spinning lug nuts on a tire.

Just 4% of high school graduates pursue careers in technical fields, whether auto or boat mechanic, plumber, heating and air-conditioning technician, or factory worker. Mechanically minded young people are instead pushed by parents and guidance counselors to attend college or are pulled by the high-technology industry into a cutting-edge field.

“If they don’t go to college and don’t work in a cubicle,” they think “they’re not going to make it,” said Joe Lamacchia, a Newton, Mass. landscaping entrepreneur whose website, bluecollarandproudofit.com, promotes employment in the trades.

Young adults ill-suited to desk work, he said, pass up opportunities to make good money in challenging blue-collar jobs. “You can’t mould them into the groove where they want everyone behind the desk or joining the math club.”

At least one million US jobs, most of which do not require a four-year degree, went unfilled this year because employers could not find workers with the necessary skills, the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington organisation that addresses worker training, estimates.

Homeowners have bumped up against shortages when they try to hire contractors unable to find enough people to do the work that comes in the door, though the end of major public construction projects in the Boston area, such as the Big Dig, has increased the supply of tradespeople locally. But scarcities return as the economy rebounds. By 2007, 25,000 or more US electrician jobs may go unfilled, the National Electrical Contractors Association estimates.

In Massachusetts, high vacancy rates currently exist among auto mechanics, carpenters, nurses’ aides, and precision machine operators on factory floors, said Andrew Sum, director of North-eastern’s Center for Labor Market Studies. Manufacturers report great difficulty filling jobs requiring specialised talents or math skills.