These White-Collar Workers Actually Made the Switch to a Trade
Plenty of office workers fantasize about life in a blue-collar job with good pay and stability. Pursuing it midcareer is another story.
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Lauren O’Connor on a job site in St. Louis. NICK SCHNELLE FOR WSJ
“Learn a Trade” isn’t just a rallying cry for younger generations to skip college and pursue in-demand blue-collar work. For burned-out white-collar workers, it has become a popular midcareer fantasy.
Fears of an AI ‘jobpocalypse’ have prompted more than a few professionals to contemplate life as a plumber or HVAC specialist. More than 60% said they would consider pivoting into a skilled trade if it offered more money and stability, according to a recent survey of more than 3,000 white-collar workers by remote-job listing site FlexJobs.
What’s it like to actually go through with the switch? Here’s what four white-collar workers who made good on their blue-collar dreams told us:
Nick Winters, 27
Software salesman turned electrical apprentice for a local union
Cleveland
Nick Winters earlier this week. NICK WINTERS
After so many sales calls, Nick Winters says he saw the writing on the wall. The executives he pitched often talked about wanting to make their corporate workforces more efficient.
He wondered: What could I do to make myself more irreplaceable?
A career requiring a human touch had always intrigued him. And he was handy. After talking with his soon-to-be father-in-law—a sheet-metal worker—he took the union tests for plumbing, elevator construction and electrical work. But it was helping his uncle wire his garage that clinched it.
“I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, I did that,’” he says.
The process of getting started was long. He passed the electrical exam in 2024 and then it took more than a year to get into the union.
And the pay cut is drastic. In his final year in sales, he earned about $120,000. As a first-year apprentice, it’s less than half of that. To save up, he slashed his budget, especially eating out.
The job, he says, feels like a low-intensity workout for eight hours a day. He would come home sore from his first days on the job, his hands and feet covered in blisters. “I come from the world of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and making a certain number of calls a day,” he says. “The requirement here is, ‘Show up on time and be ready to learn.’”
Joining the union, though, means he will get guaranteed wage increases and puts him on track to make more than $100,000 a year some day.
Even “when I’m in the mud and I have filled up my muck boots with mud and water, at no point have I ever thought, ‘Man I miss the office,’” he says.
Lauren O’Connor, 33
Teacher turned pipe fitter
St. Louis
Lauren O'Connor left teaching to become a pipe fitter. NICK SCHNELLE FOR WSJ
At 27, Lauren O’Connor was living paycheck to paycheck as a Montessori teacher, making $29 an hour with no benefits. Today, the 33-year-old earns $45 an hour—brazing, welding and soldering pipes for a local contractor.
A friend who’d gone into ironwork straight from high school suggested she apply to a local union. At the time, the prospect of healthcare and 401(k) benefits intrigued her, as did the actual work. She’d always liked tinkering with motorcycles and woodworking, and after years of teaching, she felt burned out.
As a pre-apprentice with the plumbers and pipe fitters union in 2021, she initially earned $15 an hour. When she becomes a full journeyman this summer, she’ll make more than $50 an hour.
In 2023, she bought a two-bedroom house, with a sunroom and oversize garage where she parks her motorcycle and recently purchased Bronco. Meanwhile, she gets Yeti swag and treated to company picnics and parties.
Before all of that, O’Connor had assumed college would be her best ticket to a middle-class life.
O’Connor, a former Montessori teacher, now makes $45 an hour brazing and welding pipes.
NICK SCHNELLE FOR WSJ
But one semester short of graduation and with $35,000 in loans, she dropped out. She was already teaching Montessori and didn’t need the degree or extra loans. “It’s like a never-ending cycle of debt,” she says.
These days, she is often carrying heavy pipes or a 45-pound backpack that she wears to haul her tools up and down ladders. To build strength, she signed up for a gym membership and started working out.
Though she sees more women on job sites these days, it wasn’t that way at first. Proving herself to the guys was stressful, she says. She studied up on her own time until she felt more confident in her skills. About 98% of the guys are really supportive, she says. The other 2% she has learned to laugh off or cope with.
She enjoys the bantering vibe of the crews she’s on, even if she still misses working with children. “You realize how witty some of these guys are,” she says. “I’ve had a blast.”
Candace Robinson, 48
Commercial loan-servicing associate turned cardiovascular sonographer
Jacksonville, Fla.
Candace Robinson transitioned from a bank job to healthcare.CANDACE ROBINSON
Candace Robinson told herself she wouldn’t stay long at the bank where she worked. Then, 10 years passed. She made a decent living, even if the job wasn’t a passion.
As she saw more co-workers get laid off, many of them as they approached 50, she took stock of what her job had become. “It’s just problem-solving, slinging emails,” she said.
Her husband worked at Concorde Career Colleges, which focus on healthcare training, and he had encouraged her to look into its programs. “I don’t want to be a nurse,” she’d reply.
The pandemic—and the desperate need for healthcare workers—changed her perspective. She chose to train in cardiovascular sonography, partly because the imaging appealed to her artistic side. Thanks to her husband’s employee discount, she didn’t have to pay tuition for the 22-month course, just fees.
One thing that surprised her was the level of instruction she got about touching patients. The best tips were about using words first: “I need to unbutton your gown because I’m going to be scanning your chest, but I’ll keep you covered with this towel.”
Most days she does echocardiograms, placing probes on patients’ bodies. Or she operates the machine as the doctor guides a probe down the esophagus. One of the harder adjustments was getting comfortable speaking up to doctors on behalf of patients, but she says her voice rings louder when she’s advocating for them.
She makes about the same as in her corporate job—less than six-figures—but says she would have taken a pay cut.
“It’s actually dealing with life and death,” she says, “but it is so much less stressful than when I was just dealing with emails.”
Ben Neville, 32
Certified public accountant turned pilot-in-training
Washington, D.C.
Ben Neville saved up to train to become a pilot. MORIAH RATNER FOR WSJ
Five years of paying $500 a month for a bedroom in a shared apartment—on an accountant’s salary—enabled Ben Neville to train for a new career as a pilot. He has spent $130,000 in lessons and plane rentals so far, using the money he saved by living cheaply so long.
“If you couldn’t self-fund or get a loan, it’d be easy to get stuck,” he says.
It wasn’t his original plan. The son of a stay-at-home mom and shipyard worker, he got a double major in finance and Chinese from the College of William & Mary, then a master’s in accounting.
After a year of working often 80 hours a week at Ernst & Young, he took an accounting job with the Navy. By 2024, he earned $160,000 a year.
He pined for more: “I’d be micro-editing PowerPoint presentations and thinking, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” From his office window, he’d see planes taking off and wish he was there. Meanwhile, his brother had gotten a job making six figures as a lineman. “I thought, there’s a lot out there I didn’t know about,” he says.
In the fall of 2024, with no flying experience (apart from being a passenger in coach), he started lessons.
The first time he took off, it was a little bumpy. But he loved it. “It’s just that feeling of getting pushed back in your seat a little bit, the speed,” he says.
Neville running through a preflight checklist with his instructor, Jim Henderson.
MORIAH RATNER FOR WSJ
In 2025, he took President Trump’s buyout and began training in earnest, renting planes on the weekend to rack up the 1,500 hours of flight time typically needed to get a first-officer role.
A first-officer job, depending on the size of employer, could pay as little as $30,000, he says. After three or so years, he expects to make much more: Airline and commercial pilots earn a median $198,000.
Neville says it isn’t about the money. “There’s always something to learn, it keeps you on your toes,” he says. “It’s almost the opposite of a desk job. I go up in a plane on a Saturday, and one hour later, I’m at the beach.”
