How Blue-Collar Workers Are Making the Leap into Tech Jobs
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Here's your Money Briefing for Monday, April 11th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. We've talked a lot about the Great Resignation. Workers leaving their jobs in record numbers in search of things like better pay or more flexibility. While many people are seeking new positions within their field, more blue-collar workers are making the move out of their industries and into tech.
Many of these workers who end up in roles like cybersecurity and software sales and things like that can do that work from home. And also many of them are used to working jobs that came with sort of uncommon hours or unreliable hours.
On today's show, we'll talk with our workplace reporter, Catherine Dill, about this trend and how workers are ramping up their skills to take on a new career in tech. That's after the break.
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Hey, Catherine, thank you so much for being with us. My pleasure. So Catherine, when we talk about blue-collar workers moving into tech, what kind of tech jobs are we talking about?
These are what we're calling new-collar jobs. These are middle-skill jobs that often require some tech skills, but not necessarily the full scope of what you might get out of like a computer science degree. So some programming skills, workers who work on cybersecurity or developing web applications or workers who've moved from a sales rep job to an account manager job. That's the type of job we're looking at here.
What trend is driving blue-collar workers to consider tech careers?
Now, what kinds of industries are people in who are making the switch?
We looked at new research collected over the last two years that found that more than a tenth of Americans who were in these low-paying roles in industries like warehousing, manufacturing, hospitality, and other lower-wage and hourly positions are the ones that were really making the switch.
How big is this trend of people making a switch like this?
It's a significant number. It's more than a tenth of Americans in these low-paying and hourly wage roles that the data looked at. And this is significant in a lot of ways. Data from the Current Population Survey, as well as LinkedIn, suggests that the pandemic has helped an increasing number of workers move into much more upwardly mobile careers.
So it sounds like many of these workers have gotten a boost to their career more so than if they had stayed where they were.
That's absolutely right. You know, one of the workers that we spoke with said that she always knew that she had the grit for this type of career. She just didn't really know how to navigate towards it. And, you know, another one that I spoke with said that he had had multiple jobs for years and worked very hard and been fairly successful in those jobs, but nothing that was going to help him get on a professional or financial trajectory for growth. And now that's where he is.
Now, you mentioned that a lot of these jobs might not require a computer science degree, but do they require any kind of degree?
No, many of them don't.
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