When Jonathan Sterling picks up a blowtorch these days, it’s not a metaphor. The 46-year-old former real-estate executive spends his mornings crawling through an industrial warehouse and cutting copper pipe in an HVAC training lab not far from his home in Vero Beach, Florida. “I never used a torch before,” he said. “You’re crawling around with live wires, high voltage, risk everywhere. It’s dangerous.”

Until last year, Sterling oversaw operations for 35 Keller Williams offices and 7,000 agents, helping generate roughly $13 billion in annual sales. When corporate layoffs hit in mid-2024, he joined the growing ranks of white-collar professionals wondering what — if anything — felt safe anymore.

“AI scares the hell out of me,” he told Quartz. Much of the work he once did, determining web strategy and overseeing website builds, was all too easily outsourced to AI bots. He’d watched longtime friends experience layoffs, too. “They were made redundant by companies slashing and burning the lower-level jobs that have been replaced with AI, which then means they don’t have a need for the people who were managing them — my friends,” he said.

So, instead of chasing another marketing or management role, Sterling enrolled in a hands-on, eight-week HVAC course costing $2,700. He plans to work in the field long enough to be “legitimate in the eyes of others in the industry,” then move into a leadership post at a company that’s expanding. Nights and weekends, he’s building Foxtown Education, a fledgling site listing trade schools and certification programs for other mid-career professionals like him.

“People are still in denial that their cushy jobs are safe,” he said. “I figured I’d rip the Band-Aid off now.”

The white-collar crisis of meaning — and security

Call it the learn-to-craft era. Across TikTok, LinkedIn, and backyard-barbecue small talk, a new fantasy is taking hold: leaving the laptop behind to weld, fix, or plumb. If it seems familiar, it’s because it’s the uncanny mirror image of the learn-to-code mantra that defined the 2010s, when knowledge work seemed the surest path to stability and status. In 2025, with generative-AI tools writing code — plus composing copy and designing logos — the safest jobs may be the ones that require torque wrenches and flame-retardant gloves.

Google searches for “trade school for adults” have more than doubled since early 2023, and some accelerated plumbing and HVAC programs report 10-30% higher applications, according to industry publications. Yet the number of Americans actually working in skilled trades is roughly flat—about 13% of total U.S. employment. For every Sterling changing careers, hundreds more are simply day-dreaming about it online.

Because California is “the country’s largest job market,” it’s a good indicator, said Lisa Countryman-Quiroz, CEO of JVS Bay Area, a nonprofit that runs apprenticeship programs in automotive and water-utility maintenance. “For the first time in state history, we’re seeing white-collar jobs shrinking while blue-collar roles in construction and manufacturing are on the rise.” That shift, she adds, “shows the direction we’re heading more broadly,” even if it’s still early days.

The pendulum swings back

Countryman-Quiroz views growing enthusiasm for the trades as “the pendulum swinging back from the ‘learn-to-code’ era.” Before, workers chased tech’s promise of high pay and flexibility. Now the incentives have flipped. A four-year degree costs an average of $25,000 a year between tuition and fees, student-loan payments are back — with one in 25 American adults in default — and office work feels precarious. “Instead of going thousands of dollars into debt,” she said, “trade workers can often secure a union job with high earning and advancement potential.”

At JVS, graduates from skilled-trade programs roughly double their income within two years — rising from about $31,000 to more than $63,000 — with plenty of room to grow. Demand is strongest in water-system maintenance, a field facing nationwide staffing shortages. “These are jobs that require as much technical knowledge as any desk job,” she said. “You’re working with complex machinery and rigorous safety standards.” In other words, it’s not remedial work — it’s highly skilled work.

Still, she cautions against framing this as a mass white-collar exodus. JVS primarily serves lower-income job-seekers, not laid-off tech or marketing managers. What’s really changing, she argues, is the cultural conversation: People are realizing a stable, respected career doesn’t have to mean sitting in front of a computer all day.

The satisfaction of fixing something tangible

For Sterling, the appeal is as much emotional as economic. After two decades of “writing catchy Google ads” and managing remote teams, he’s enjoying the instant feedback of fixing something real. “You go piece by piece, solving a puzzle,” he said.

Physical risk was new territory. “You can burn yourself or blow something up,” he laughed. “But after a few days you start to feel confident.”

He’s not romanticizing the trades, however. Entry-level HVAC techs start around $25 an hour, or about $50,000 a year. Still, demand is steady: the BLS projects more than 600,000 job openings annually in installation and repair fields through 2034. “People here worry more about their air-con going out than they do about alligators,” he joked. “In Florida, it’s life or death.”

What AI can’t replace

Even as automation advances, most hands-on technical roles remain stubbornly analog. “Our research has found that ‘human skills’— interpersonal communication, creative thinking, teamwork, and problem-solving —remain in high demand,” Countryman-Quiroz said. “Trade-job postings emphasize those soft skills as much as technical ones.” The human factor may explain why interest in the trades spikes during every technological upheaval. Robots might assemble cars, but someone still has to maintain the factory’s water system or repair the HVAC keeping servers cool.

Yet nostalgia for “real work” can obscure structural gaps. The U.S. invests just 0.1% of GDP in workforce development — one-fifth what other advanced economies spend — leaving workers to retrain largely on their own. “We need far more investment from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors in job training and workforce development,” Countryman-Quiroz argued. It’s equally important to remove “structural barriers, like the high cost of childcare, that prevent workers from accessing better opportunities.”

Crafting a different kind of security

Sterling isn’t waiting for policy to catch up. Foxtown Education, the site he recently launched, lists trade schools and CDL programs, aiming to demystify blue-collar work and other “neglected careers” for the LinkedIn crowd. “If you’re even a little bit curious,” he advises trade-curious professionals, “go find a class and just check it out. Don’t put too much of your old filter on it.” Sterling also recommends searching out programs that skip the textbook-instruction portion and go straight to manual, hands-on learning, like the one he’s completing.

Whether “learn to craft” becomes a real labor-market shift or remains just a coping meme for anxious office workers, it reflects something very real — the ache for security and self-respect in a rapidly changing and already volatile economy. Sterling, for his part, said he feels more empowered and confident now, even kneeling on a shop floor with an acetylene torch.

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