Look at it as money left on the table.

Throughout the mountains, like much of the United States, companies are scrambling to find enough blue collar workers, particularly skilled trades workers — for jobs that often pay well over $50,000 a year.

Between a sizzling hot job market and younger workers opting for college or simply not being interested in jobs that require sweating and getting dirty, the problem will likely only grow more acute. That means companies will continue to scramble for plumbers, electricians, heating and air conditioning technicians, welders, construction workers and other traditional blue collar jobs.

"You've got to be willing to expand your horizons in who you're willing to hire," said Max Rose, owner of Four Seasons Plumbing in Asheville. "To hire somebody in this area who's experienced, has a clean background, has their life together and can pass a drug test, that's a miracle. Most guys here like that, their employers are taking very good care of them."

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Rose also makes sure to take good care of his 22 employees, which includes 11 plumbers and two apprentices. His training program runs a total of two years and costs the company at least $40,000, so they want to bring in top quality people and retain them.

"You have to be willing to look outside of our area, and you have to be willing to pay for relocation and spend quite a bit of money on training," Rose said.

As older skilled workers continue to retire in droves, filling these jobs will become even more difficult, according to Heath Moody, department chair for A-B Tech Community College's Construction Management, Building Science & Sustainability Technologies department. In an article he wrote for GreenBuilt Alliance, Moody cited a recent Pew Research Center estimate that 10,000 American workers become eligible for retirement every day.

"It’s estimated that 60% of skilled trade positions could leave the workforce in the next five years," Moody wrote. "Some companies began reporting difficulties in hiring skilled labor as early as 2013. Many sources say this challenge has the potential to significantly influence the economy."

The reasons for the shortage are complex, but Moody would like to see schools start steering students toward the trades again.

"I think we could change the view of getting into the skilled trades by starting to talk about these kinds of jobs in high school and even middle school," Moody said. "I think there's a big marketing and image thing we have to address in the skilled trades. One thing that would help is that kids want to have jobs that they feel are solution-oriented."

The emphasis on green building and environmentally friendly industries is one part of that, he said.

'We plan on not being able to fill positions'

At Bolton Construction & Service Of WNC, Inc., Vice President Mark Bolton said the shortage of workers has been going on for several years. The company has an apprenticeship program through the Plumbing Heating Cooling Contractors of North Carolina, a trade association.

A high school graduate would start at $14 to learn a trade, with the pay rising to $20 an hour in year four and then $22 an hour once they pass the journeyman requirements, Bolton said. The company also offers a full suite of benefits.

But it's still not enough to fill the work vans with enough employees.

"Believe it or not, we plan on not being able to fill positions," Bolton said. "We don't assume we're just going to find people. We assume it's going to take four years to build the skills in someone to fill the role."

Bolton handles heating, cooling, plumbing and electrical work, all jobs that require workers who are good with their hands but also have the intelligence to handle complicated systems.

"It's so rare to find the skill set we need, so we're planning four years down the road to train them and create and build those skill sets," Bolton said.

2.4 million manufacturing jobs will be available

Nathan Ramsey, director of the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board, said it's not just blue collar jobs going wanting.

"Certainly our region’s employers in all sectors are struggling to meet their workforce needs now," Ramsey said.

He noted that the mountain counties around Asheville have maintained the lowest unemployment rate in the state for 48 consecutive months, while Buncombe County has maintained the lowest unemployment rate of any county for the same period. In February, Buncombe's unemployment rate stood at 3.2%, again the lowest in the state and well below the state average of 3.9%.

Ramsey referenced a recent survey of area employers, "The State of Our Workforce: Western NC," in which 84.7% of construction firms responding said they expect their workforce to grow.

"The construction/skilled trades sector are seeing significant challenges in recruiting the talent they need at all levels, from entry-level to advanced," Ramsey said.

"Sobering," is how Tom Tveidt, an economist and founder of Syneva Economics in Asheville, describes the job opening numbers for the first quarter of 2019 for the Asheville Metropolitan Statistical Area (Buncombe, Haywood, Madison, and Henderson Counties).

The MSA had 12,945 advertised job openings.

"They are somewhat seasonal, but actually some areas, like healthcare, have been trending down recently, yet still having many openings," Tveidt said.

The MSA had 80 openings for electricians, 78 for heating and air conditioning mechanics and installers, and 52 for plumbers.

The manufacturing sector uses a lot of skilled labor, and the workforce crisis is particularly acute there. In November 2018, the accounting firm Deloitte teamed with The Manufacturing Institute, part of the National Association of Manufacturers, to release a study with some eye-popping numbers.

"The widening manufacturing skills gap is expected to grow from about 488,000 jobs left open today to as many as 2.4 million manufacturing jobs going unfilled between this year and 2028 (compared with 2 million jobs between 2015 and 2025 per our earlier study), the online journal Materials Handling & Logistics said in summary. "In turn, $454 billion in manufacturing GDP could be at risk in 2028, or more than $2.5 trillion over the next decade."

An aging workforce

The low unemployment rate contributes to companies being unable to find enough workers. But the country as a whole has also pushed a lot of younger people toward college and away from the trades.

The upshot is trades workers tend to be older.

"What I'm seeing in my role — I'm 34 years old — and I'm one of the youngest guys on the job," said Justin Belt, a field supervisor and project manager with Wells Construction Group. "Nobody my age is being a plumber, an electrician, a construction worker."

Belt, who got a degree in construction management from Western Carolina University, said a combination of factors come into play.

Some kids go to college who would be a lot better off learning a skilled trade, but some young workers simply opt for jobs that pay well but don't require hard physical labor and getting dirty. Instead they choose to peddle cell phones or work in lower level information technology jobs, he said.

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At Gentry Heating & Air in Asheville, which employs about 95 workers total, General Manager Mike Young said they've seen the same phenomenon.

"We’ve had to hire from outside the area quite often because of the shortage," Young said. "We've had people moving in from Winston-Salem, Baltimore, up north, different places. We've definitely had to figure out a different way to recruit highly qualified service techs."

Daniel Mancuso, chair of A-B Tech's electrical, electronics and computer engineering program, offers some perspective.

"Last year there were less than 100 licensed electricians in North Carolina under the age of 30, out of 12,000 licensed electricians," Mancuso said. "We have a lot of contractors where a good portion of them —upwards of 40% — could retire at any moment. With some of the contractors it’s over 50%."

And that's for an occupation in which the median annual wage, as of May 2018, was $55,190, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Years ago it was more common to hire younger apprentices, often out of high school or a few years removed, and let them learn from more experienced workers. But that's getting harder all the time.

Buncombe County Schools does have a curriculum called Career and Technical Education, which offers 17 pathways in the high schools, and multiple pathways at the middle school level, according to BCS spokeswoman Stacia Harris.

"Also, we are adding a drone curriculum, and we've expanded early child care, culinary arts (ProStart) in high school and Project Lead the Way in Middle School," she said. "Meanwhile, students who attend Buncombe County Middle College, and our traditional high schools, too, have the opportunity to pursue a Career Pathway in partnership with A-B Tech..."

That can include career credentials in computer-integrated machining, sustainability technologies, welding, and automotive systems.

"We work with community partners to ensure our curriculum is aligned and relevant to the needs of our community in terms of current and future jobs," Harris said.

But trades jobs are still going unfilled.

Too many degrees?

The emphasis on sending more and more high school students to college has played a role in the shortage of younger blue collar workers. In general college degrees do translate into higher wages.

The Social Security Administration noted in 2015 that men with bachelor's degrees will earn about "$900,000 more in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates. Women with bachelor's degrees earn $630,000 more."

But those are broad, general numbers that also don't factor in for skilled labor, or for degrees that don't translate into a job.

"There are a lot of people who get a degree and can’t find the job," Young said. "It's kind of a cliche, but the idea of the 30-year-old man living in his dad’s basement playing video games is really real."

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Rose, the Four Seasons Plumbing owner, said in recent years he's hired one guy with a degree in archaeology and another with a business degree from Auburn, both to train as plumbers.

Four Seasons starts trainees at $12-15 an hour, and "everybody gets full benefits at the start," Rose said. A South Asheville native who attended Lees-McRae College, A-B Tech and UNC-Asheville, Rose is "not anti-college," as he says. But sometimes practicality is lacking in the college curriculum, and graduates emerge with mountains of loans.

"I’ve hired some guys that have master’s degrees and have mountains of debt," Rose said.

Spencer Hollifield, 21, wanted to avoid that fate. A Roberson High School graduate, Hollifield joined Gentry Heating & Air after graduation, but he simultaneously completed A-B Tech two-year program in heating and air conditioning.

"I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I definitely didn't want to get a degree and end up not using it," Hollifield said. "So I decided to look into some trades."

Always good with his hands, Hollifield knew he wouldn't spend a career in a cubicle. He also wanted a career that would pay well.

Now he's an HVAC mechanic, spending his days taking out old systems and installing new ones. But he'll likely work to become a service technician, taking on the more complicated jobs of diagnosing and fixing existing furnaces and air conditioners.

"I can make $50,000-$60,000 in four or five years from now," Hollifield said, adding that he derives a lot of satisfaction from the challenge of his job. "I like the fact that it's always something new every week."

While he's not anti-college, he does feels schools have steered too many graduates to four-year universities.

"I think it all just depends on what you want to do," Hollifield said. "For some things you have to have a college education; for other things you don’t have to have it. But I do think a lot of guys go who don’t know what they want to do go into college, and they basically waste four years of their lives and then go into something else."

Young said a beginning service tech with Gentry will start "anywhere between $17-$19 an hour. A master technician would make over $30 an hour if they're in the commercial side."

That's over $62,000 a year, and that doesn't count overtime.

Rose said he kind of fell into plumbing work while trying to figure out what he wanted to do. He worked at a ski resort in Colorado, but once he and his wife had a son, he decided he needed to settle into a career.

Always fond of working with his hands, Rose got an apprenticeship with a plumbing company that paid for his classes at a community college in Colorado so he could learn the trade. He started his company in Asheville in 2006 and managed to weather the Great Recession of 2008-09.

Like the company that first took him on, Rose is willing to train workers and invest in them. He notes that the first six months of training is about a $40,000 investment for his company.

"It takes about six months to get them where they're helping us out and are not just a complete liability," Rose said with a laugh.

Good plumbers who stick with it can make between $60,000-$80,000 a year, Rose said, but it does take a commitment to work hard.

"The guys we find who succeed are a little older, maybe late 20s, early 30s," Rose said. "For somebody right out of high school or in their early 20s, they've got to realize it’s a career and a serious commitment — you can’t hang out with your friends and party all night and not show up for work."

Young also sees some younger workers who will throw a career away over one or two bad days. Some just don't to work too hard, and high-paying skilled trades do require physical labor.

"The millennials' attitude to some degree, is they want to get out of college and start collecting their $100,000 a year behind a computer," Young said with a laugh.

Companies like Gentry are willing to train employees, and Young said their program will take two years to fully train a technician to be capable of doing installation jobs on their own. To be a maintenance technician, which involves diagnosing often complex problems or systems, typically takes about five years of experience.

Gentry, like its competitors, offers top-notch benefits, too, including a matching 401(k) investment program, retirement benefits, insurance and top wages.

Any solutions?

One step in the right direction to producing more trades workers, officials say, would be to get more students in a trades track much earlier, or to at least get high school and even middle school counselors to start informing students about their options.

Moody, at A-B Tech, cited Bureau of Labor Statistics "that show 30 percent of U.S. high school students now graduate with neither academic nor job skills. While 68 percent of high school students attend college, the BLS reports that 40 percent of them don’t complete a four-year degree. And of those who do complete, the BLS says a third of graduates end up in jobs that didn’t require a four-year degree."

In the late 1990s, or even earlier, a lot of high schools stopped pushing trades programs, the advent of the philosophy that "everybody had to go to college," Mancuso said. Then in the early 2000s, a lot of corporations dialed back or ended their apprenticeship programs, followed by the crushing recession of 2008-09, when construction, manufacturing and other trades jobs dried up.

Now, with a booming economy, those jobs are back in demand. Mancuso said A-B Tech has some trades graduates "pushing $100,000" a year in certain fields.

Debbie Cromwell, A-B Tech's workplace learning coordinator, said part of the job they have is to simply get the word out that high-paying, career jobs such as welding and machinists are out there, in abundance. Also, some company's apprenticeship programs will pay for training and community college tuition.

An entry level machinists would probably start in the $15-an-hour range, Cromwell said, noting that can increase to $18-$22 an hour within two or three years, "not to mention overtime." Experienced machinists can make $26-$32 hourly (machinists make precision metal parts).

A-B Tech hopes more funding is forthcoming to expand their programs, and that more companies will create or expand apprenticeship programs. Demand may ebb and flow with the economy, but the need will always be there.

"We're always going to be building things, always repairing things," Cromwell said. "Yes, anybody can be hit by a recession or pseudo-recession, but we still will need to have electricians and AC repairmen. The essentials we all need will break down."

Her colleague, Darinda Noah, an apprenticeship specialist at the college, said she foresees the pendulum swinging back toward more apprenticeships and vocational education.

"We often talk about the fact that trends make circles," Noah said. "An apprenticeship is an old fashioned idea, but it also is the next step in being able to fill these positions."

Blue collar jobs, by the numbers

• According to the AARP, 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every single day, and this is expected to continue into the 2030s (Source: The Motley Fool).

• Skilled tradesmen jobs pay well, with salaries varying depending on experience and skills. The careers website Sokanu, citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, notes that in North Carolina, "Plumbers earn an average yearly salary of $42,530. Salaries typically start at $29,710 and go up to $58,390. The BLS reports that the national average plumber's salary is approximately $50,000."

• The median annual wage for carpenters was $45,170 in May 2017. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $27,790, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $80,350 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

• The median annual wage for electricians was $55,190 in May 2018. Employment of electricians is projected to grow 9 percent from 2016 to 2026, about as fast as the average for all occupations U.S. BLS)

• Construction Managers (monitor projects and make daily decisions about construction activities, typically requires a bachelor’s degree, with on-the-job training). Median annual wage was $93,370 in May 2018. Employment of construction managers was projected to grow 11 percent from 2016 to 2026, faster than the average for all occupations. (U.S. BLS)

• The proportion of high school students who earned three or more credits in occupational education — typically an indication that they're interested in careers in the skilled trades — has fallen from 1 in 4 in 1990 to 1 in 5 now, according to the U.S. Department of Education (National Public Radio)