Mike Rowe Says “Here’s The Six-Figure Jobs Nobody Wants”

Mike Rowe says the United States does not have a shortage of good jobs so much as a shortage of people willing or prepared to fill many of them, especially in skilled trades where employers are increasingly offering high pay, paid training and direct paths into work that does not require a four-year degree.

Speaking with Jack Selby and Graham Stephan on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, Rowe argued that the country has spent years telling young people to pursue college while giving far less attention to jobs in welding, construction, electrical work, shipbuilding, automotive repair and other trades that can lead to six-figure incomes.

Rowe, best known for Dirty Jobs and his longtime advocacy through the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, said the issue has become serious enough that both government and major companies are now investing heavily in training pipelines because they cannot find enough skilled workers.

Rowe Says The Warning Started 15 Years Ago

Rowe said he first raised the issue publicly during the Obama administration, after President Barack Obama announced plans connected to millions of “shovel-ready” jobs.

At the time, Rowe wrote an open letter arguing that creating those jobs would not be enough if Americans had already been taught to look down on the kind of work they involved.

His message then was that trades needed better public relations.

Young people had to be shown that these jobs were valuable, technically demanding and capable of producing strong incomes, rather than being treated as a fallback for people who did not go to college.

Rowe said he later made a similar case to Congress, telling lawmakers that government alone could not solve the skills gap but could still play an important role in rebuilding interest in vocational work.

He said both Republicans and Democrats were receptive in conversation, but very little changed for years.

Defense Industry Says It Needs Hundreds Of Thousands Of Workers

Rowe said the federal government is now taking the shortage much more seriously, particularly in the defense industrial base.

He pointed to a government-backed platform called Buildfreedom US, which he said lists roughly 400,000 open positions, many of them skilled-trade jobs that can reach six figures and are much harder to automate with artificial intelligence.

Rowe said his foundation has millions of dollars available for men and women who want to learn in-demand trades, while the government is also putting more resources into workforce development.

One of the biggest needs, according to him, is welding.

Rowe said shipbuilders and submarine manufacturers are deeply concerned about where they will find enough workers and may need roughly 400,000 welders over the next seven or eight years.

When Selby and Stephan asked whether the United States should be worried about competition from countries such as China, Rowe said the problem involves far more than individual work ethic.

Shipbuilding depends on government contracts, organized labor, imported steel, regulatory policy and other structural factors, he said, making it difficult to reduce the problem to one cause.

Manufacturing Wants To Grow, But Existing Jobs Are Already Empty

Rowe said politicians regularly talk about reshoring manufacturing and creating millions of new industrial jobs, but he believes that discussion skips over a much more immediate problem.

He cited roughly 480,000 manufacturing jobs that are already unfilled and said the replacement rate in the trades has remained deeply unfavorable for years.

For every five skilled workers who retire, he said, only about two new workers are entering to replace them.

That ratio, Rowe argued, is simply not sustainable.

He gave a personal example from the crew that built his house, saying the youngest worker was already 50 years old when the job was done more than a decade ago.

The same aging problem can be seen in fields such as home inspection, appraisal, contracting and automotive repair, where experienced workers are retiring faster than younger people are entering.

This is where Rowe’s argument is strongest: employers cannot endlessly announce new factories, data centers and infrastructure projects if there are not enough electricians, welders, mechanics and technicians available to actually build and maintain them.

Major Companies Are Spending Heavily On Training

Rowe said corporate America is responding to the shortage with increasingly aggressive training programs.

He mentioned Lowe’s committing roughly $250 million to workforce development, Home Depot investing around $100 million and BlackRock putting significant money into similar efforts.

He also described a five-week pre-apprenticeship program tied to Meta in which participants can train in areas such as fiber optics, electrical work and construction.

According to Rowe, the company covers travel, food and related costs, pays participants during training and guarantees a job afterward.

Even if someone ultimately decides not to work for Meta or remain on a specific project, Rowe said they can leave with certifications that may still be valuable elsewhere.

That kind of arrangement represents a very different model from the traditional college path because the worker is being paid to acquire a skill instead of borrowing money for several years before entering the job market.

Rowe Rejects The Idea That America Needs Fewer Educated People

The conversation eventually turned to whether too many workers have entered fields such as software engineering while trades remain understaffed.

Rowe resisted framing the problem as one profession having too many people and another having too few.

He referenced a remark from Sen. Marco Rubio years earlier saying the country needed fewer philosophers and more welders.

Rowe said he disagreed with the basic framing, even though he understood the point Rubio was trying to make.

Rather than choosing between intellectual education and practical skill, Rowe said the country would be better served by people who can combine both.

He joked that America could use more philosophers who understand steel fabrication and more welders who can talk intelligently about logic, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Descartes or Kant.

That is a broader point than simply telling teenagers to skip college.

Rowe’s argument is that education itself needs to be reimagined so technical competence and academic knowledge are not treated as opposing paths.

Unemployment Does Not Tell The Whole Story

Rowe also questioned whether the traditional unemployment rate still gives an accurate picture of the labor market.

He cited economist Nicholas Eberstadt’s work on prime-age men who are not working and said the country can have millions of open jobs at the same time that millions of people remain outside the workforce.

Rowe said there are roughly 7.2 million open positions, many of which do not require a bachelor’s degree, yet a large group of working-age men remain disconnected from employment.

That does not necessarily mean every open job is suitable for every unemployed person, and location, pay, training, health and family circumstances all matter.

Still, Rowe’s broader point is difficult to dismiss: a labor market can have both worker shortages and people struggling to find work at the same time when skills, expectations and geography do not line up.

For Selby and Stephan, that raised the obvious question of whether the trades are now one of the clearest opportunities for younger workers looking for stable, well-paid careers.

Rowe’s answer was essentially yes, but with a larger warning attached.

The jobs already exist, the pay can be excellent and employers are increasingly willing to finance the training themselves, but unless American culture becomes more willing to value vocational work, companies may continue struggling to fill the very positions that politicians keep promising to create.