In this series we are going to look at many different types of jobs that are available in the U.S. economy. Some of them require special skills, some of them require a college degree… but what if you have none of that? What if you have no skills in particular, yet you do not want to work a minimum wage job? In the following video he opens with this question: “How do I get into the skilled trades when I have no skill?”

He also talks about which trades make the most money. Around 8:10 he describes how plumbing, electrical and HVAC are three areas that pay well. He also mentions surface repair, countertops ($100/hour is mentioned).

Around 10:00 he talks about getting two certificates from a community college.

He then talks about coming in as a gofer, and then picking up knowledge osmotically and becoming more valuable each day.

Diving into the Handyman Channel

His channel is fascinating because he demonstrates many of the tasks he does in his line of handyman work. There are also these three fascinating videos on where a handyman path could take you:

• How To Be A Handyman | $200,000 Per Year
• Handyman Easily Makes $1,000 Per Day | Easy Money | What He does
• Why I Don’t Have Employees or Helpers

You can see that the path he is describing is not instantaneous, but it is a path to a good job. Something to think about as you are considering ways to make more than minimum wage.

More Jobs Articles

Easy directory of all of Marshall Brain’s Jobs-related blog posts:

1. Introduction to “Getting a Good Job in America”
2. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 2 – How do you gain skills?
3. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 3 – Newsweek weighs in with 19 jobs
4. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 4 – Driving a Truck
5. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 5 – Information Technology (IT) and Cybersecurity jobs
6. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 6 – Google Career Certificates
7. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 7 – Becoming an Engineer
8. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 8 – Making the most of entry-level sales jobs
9. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 9 – Jobs to Avoid
10. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 10 – Medical jobs like Nurse Practitioner
11. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 11 – Electrical Lineworker
12. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 12 – Software Developer and “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 12.1 – Software Developer
13. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 13 – Cybersecurity

Would you like to get a better job? It is an easy question, and it applies to a lot of different people in the United States today:

• You might be a teenager in high school, and you know that you want something better than a dead-end minimum wage job
• You may actually be in a dead-end minimum wage job and you are looking for something better
• You may have gotten a college degree, but it turns out that you can’t get much of a job with the degree you have, so you are looking for something better.
• You may have been pushed out of your job by the pandemic, or automated out of your job by robots, or downsized out of your job or whatever, and now you need to do something new.
• You may be in the middle of your life and you simply want to try something new.

Whatever the reason, this series is going to look at the job landscape in America today and help you, dear reader, find sweet spots where the “good jobs” exist and there are openings to be filled.

There are many good jobs that go empty in America today

Let’s start the search with two videos from PBS that definitely set the stage:

The beginning of the first video is talking about $100K+ job opportunities. At the 2:45 point, electrician jobs are described at $90 an hour as fairly routine. And there is a lot of demand.

These videos are talking about “skilled trades”. But there are so many other jobs hidden throughout the economy that: A) pay way better than minimum wage, and B) have lots of openings.

A sample job

Just to get us started, let’s talk about a very simple, very easy-to-understand job opportunity in America today that everyone has heard about. In this case, the job title is “Plumber’s Helper”.

Is this a great job? No. But it is a good entry-level job. The advantage of this position is that a healthy person could walk into the job with no training, and then there is an obvious upward career path toward a solid middle-class lifestyle. If you watch the first video above and then look at a position like this, you can see the path. Getting a foot into the profession is a reasonable first step.

What if you do not want to be a plumber? Or what if you already have some kind of college degree? Let me give you another quick example. You can easily find articles like this in Google:

9 High-Paying Jobs That Require Little or No Experience

The jobs described here include:

1. Transit and Railroad Police
2. Claims Adjuster
3. Web Developer
4. Power Plant Operator
5. Elevator Installer
6. Nuclear Technician
7. Radiation Therapist
8. Construction Manager
9. Air Traffic Controller

This article demonstrates that you have to take lists like this with a grain of salt. No one is going to get a “#8 Construction Manager” job with “little or no experience” as stated in the title. However, several of these jobs do fit the stated criteria.

Going forward, we will be on a search for the jobs in America that pay well – much better than minimum wage – without requiring a PhD or some sort of super-power.

More Jobs Articles

Easy directory of all of Marshall Brain’s Jobs-related blog posts:

1. Introduction to “Getting a Good Job in America”
2. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 2 – How do you gain skills?
3. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 3 – Newsweek weighs in with 19 jobs
4. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 4 – Driving a Truck
5. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 5 – Information Technology (IT) and Cybersecurity jobs
6. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 6 – Google Career Certificates
7. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 7 – Becoming an Engineer
8. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 8 – Making the most of entry-level sales jobs
9. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 9 – Jobs to Avoid
10. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 10 – Medical jobs like Nurse Practitioner
11. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 11 – Electrical Lineworker
12. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 12 – Software Developer and “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 12.1 – Software Developer
13. “Getting a Good Job in America” Part 13 – Cybersecurity

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain is 2020’s breakthrough book analyzing 25 of the biggest natural and man-made threats that humanity faces. https://doomsdaynow.com is the companion website for the book providing additional multi-media content and breaking doomsday news. “The Doomsday Book” is available now – You can order the book from Amazon and other fine retailers.

You will never look at “Climate Change” in the same way again after reading this book, because Climate Change results in many different effects that are all doomsday scenarios unless humanity takes immediate action:

• Global Warming
• Sea level rise
• Gulf Stream Collapse
• Increased Hurricanes
• Mass extinction
• Ocean Acidification
• Rain forest collapse

In the same way, you will never look at asteroids in the same way again. Or terrorism. Or drones. Or robots/automation. The Blog covers doomsday events and doomsday scenarios as they unfold in real time.

Here on MarshallBrain.com you can find the free book:

• Imagining Elon Musk’s Million-Person Mars Colony – The greatest thought experiment of all time

I was able to do a TEDx talk on this topic on October 3, and the video just became available on the TEDx Youtube channel today:

I was given 8 minutes for the talk – for lots more detail on Elon Musk’s Mars Colony please see the book. A synopsis of the book would be:

This book introduces a new economic system that aims to eliminate all of the poverty, inequality, hunger, slums and so on found on Earth today. This new system is introduced as a thought experiment within the context of the million-person Mars colony recently announced by Elon Musk. This new system will radically improve the quality of life for the vast majority of humans living on planet Earth today.

Artificial Intelligence has been making great strides over the past decade on many different fronts. Here are three notable achievements:

• IBM’s Watson beat the best human players at Jeopardy in 2011
• Self driving cars and trucks have been getting better and better, to the point where Tesla seems to think the whole problem will be solved shortly
• Tools like Alexa and Siri have become a part of normal life with their speech capabilities.

A lot of this feels like the inevitable march of progress and not that consequential, yet. But as described in Robotic Nation and The Second Intelligent Species there is going to come a point where AI starts to have a real impact of jobs, especially white collar jobs. And I wonder if we are going to look back and see 2020 as the tipping point year for that.

This video is fascinating. It describes AI designing and then building a car in great detail:

The advantages are so compelling that this kind of AI tech is going to take over the car industry. And this is the first company of this kind. Imagine what it will look like in a few years when the big players start adopting the technology.

Then there is this amazing article this week in Wired:

Give These Apps Some Notes and They’ll Write Emails for You – Entrepreneurs are building tools that create emails or marketing copy using GPT-3, text-generation technology released earlier this year.

GPT-3 is showing so much promise/potential, and is proving able to do so many amazing things, that it is mind blowing. These two videos try to explain what is happening:

There is a graph in the second video where GPT-3 is getting close to human-level functionality in certain realms. It really starts to make you wonder about how many things AI will be taking over and how many jobs will be lost in the not-too-distant future. For more info see:

• Robotic Nation 
• The Second Intelligent Species

It has been a long time since I have had a blog. But WordPress makes a blog easy so let’s see what I can come up with.