When Nathan Kecy graduated from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire a decade ago with a bachelor’s degree in communications, he found himself with about $10,000 in debt and few clear career options. He first found work as a door-to-door salesman (“a pyramid scheme,” he recalls) and then in telemarketing. Finally he landed a job as an infrastructure specialist for Datamatic, a Texas-based water-meter-technology company. He was traveling across the country installing meters, making a decent salary. But he lost his job after the company restructured in 2012, he said, and soon he found that his skills weren’t easily transferable to a new field; Datamatic’s technology was proprietary, and his expertise in the company’s installation program wasn’t appealing to employers outside that particular industry. He tried going into business with a friend, but the relationship soured. By then he had a baby and a fiancée, and he felt stuck.

Now 32, Kecy is a few months away from finishing a six-month certificate program in advanced composites manufacturing at Great Bay Community College in Rochester, N.H. The program operates out of a satellite campus that opened in 2013, with aid from a Labor Department grant meant to help community colleges reach “trade displaced” workers who need help training for new careers. The unemployment rate in southern New Hampshire is low, less than 3 percent. At one state job fair last summer, just 350 people showed up for 1,200 available jobs. In Strafford County, where Rochester is located, the largest employers include the University of New Hampshire and Liberty Mutual, but also manufacturers like Turbocam and Contitech. Kecy’s classmates include veterans, recent high-school graduates and older workers whose careers had reached dead ends. All of them are looking for hope and a decent paycheck by acquiring a new set of skills. “Within six months, I’m going to go from regular guy to working in the aerospace community,” says Tommy Florentino, a disabled veteran with a background in construction and automotive manufacturing. He has friends who went to Boston College or Suffolk University, “and they’re waiters and waitresses.”

The college’s 27,000-square-foot Advanced Technology and Academic Center is at the edge of a nondescript shopping center. The complex also houses a Dollar Tree, a J.C. Penney and a Kmart, where a banner out front reads, “Now hiring.” Cashiers there earn close to minimum wage. But Kecy expects to earn at least $16 an hour when he graduates and to move up quickly from there. Composites is a broad field in manufacturing, with applications including automotive parts, sporting goods and prosthetics, as well as in the locally prominent aerospace industry. The state’s department of economic development bills its seacoast region as “the emerging composites region,” and it points to Great Bay’s program as a reason for more aerospace and defense businesses in particular to relocate there. “I’ve got some options, which is something I’ve never really experienced before,” Kecy says.

There’s a strange disconnect between two of the big narratives about the American blue-collar work force right now. In one story, there is a population of unemployed and underemployed working-class adults for whom well-paying work seems increasingly out of reach; their jobs have gone overseas or become automated, and they find themselves working retail, or not working at all. But an apparently conflicting story comes from American employers, which have been insisting for years that they have a hard time finding workers to fill many skilled blue-collar jobs. A 2015 report from the Manufacturing Institute, for example, found that seven in 10 manufacturing executives said they faced shortages of workers with adequate tech skills. A high proportion of existing skilled workers is also nearing retirement, which means a bigger gap is looming soon. By 2025, the report warned, two million jobs will be going unfilled. (Health care, also a big focus of retraining programs, is another rapidly expanding field.)