Trade skills I wish I had, and why I respect the graft

The thing I cannot do#

I work in IT. I can fix a broken conditional access policy, untangle a firewall rule, and write a script that saves someone an afternoon. I am proud of that, and it pays the bills.

But there is a kind of competence I do not have, and it bothers me more than I let on. I cannot build a decent set of shelves. I would not trust myself to hang a door. If something goes wrong with the plumbing, I am not fixing it, I am ringing someone and hoping they can fit me in.

When the thing you are good at lives entirely behind a screen, you do not get much to point at. Nothing I do leaves a physical mark. A good week at work is a quiet inbox and nothing on fire.

Family who can actually do things#

The trades run through my family. I grew up around people who could look at a problem in the real world and just sort it. No tutorial, no waiting on a delivery of the right part from the other side of the country, no long pause while they decided whether it was worth the cost. They knew what to do, and then they did it.

I did not appreciate that when I was younger. It was just how they were. Now I watch them work and I am a bit in awe, because I understand how long it took to get that good. Nobody is born knowing how to square a corner, read a wall, or diagnose a fault by listening to it. That is years of getting it wrong in front of people who were not going to let it slide, and slowly getting it right.

I have also seen what the work costs. The early starts, the bad weather, the knees and backs, the customer who changes their mind halfway through, the one who pays late. People on the outside see the skill and sometimes forget the grind that sits underneath it. That is the graft I mean, and it is why I respect it so much.

The garden I keep picturing#

Here is where it gets personal. I want a garden I have made.

I do not mean a big landscaping project. I mean the small stuff that adds up to a place you actually want to sit in. A proper raised bed. A decent fence that does not lean. A bench made from something I cut myself. A pergola. A path that does not wobble when you step on it. I can see all of these in my head, and I cannot build any of them.

So I do what a lot of people like me do. I look at it, sketch it, price a few options, and either pay someone or leave it alone. That is not a complaint about the people I pay. It is the opposite. It is that I would love to be on the other side of that transaction, with a pile of timber, a plan, and the skill to turn one into the other.

There is something I envy in being able to stand back at the end of a day and say "I made that, and it is still going to be there in twenty years." My work mostly disappears the moment it works.

Why I have not just done it#

If I am honest, part of it is that I am scared of being bad at it in front of people. I have written before about how long it took me to do things on my own. Starting something as a beginner, where the result is visible and the mistakes are obvious, is exactly the situation I used to avoid.

But a garden is a forgiving place to be a beginner. Nobody is going to fail an inspection on a raised bed. If a cut is out, the next one will be better. I think that is where I should start, and I would rather be an adult learning something slowly than someone who never tried.

AI, and why the trades suddenly look different#

Something has shifted in how people talk about work. A few years ago, "go into the trades" was often what people said to a kid who was not doing well at school. Now it is increasingly what people say to a kid who is doing well and worried about AI.

The surveys back that up, with the usual caution that they are surveys:

• Barratt Redrow's 2026 survey of 2,000 Gen Z respondents found 52% say they are likely to choose an apprenticeship, and 48% of teens say AI and automation concerns have made some office jobs less appealing.
• Checkatrade's 2026 research found 39% of young people prefer an apprenticeship to university, against 32% who prefer university, and 75% want a career where their skills cannot easily be replaced by a machine.
• Draper's survey of under 28s found a third said recent advances in AI had made them consider a career in the trade.

I understand why. A language model can draft a report, summarise a meeting, write a function, and answer a support ticket. It cannot crawl into a loft, find the leak, and fix it. It cannot fit a boiler in a house built in 1930 where nothing is square and the previous owner did something creative with the pipework. Physical work in messy, unpredictable places is hard to automate, and I would not bet on that changing quickly.

I do not want to oversell this either. AI will touch the trades. Quoting, scheduling, invoicing, diagnostics, and design are all getting software help, and tradespeople who use it well will have an edge. But the hands, the judgement on site, and the trust of a customer who lets you into their home are not going anywhere soon.

There is a genuine shortage#

The demand side is real. The Construction Industry Training Board's Construction Workforce Outlook says UK construction will need an average of 41,200 extra workers each year between 2026 and 2030, about 206,000 over five years. That covers growth in work and replacing people who leave or retire.

It also says too few people are entering the sector and too many experienced workers are leaving, and that productivity improvements have not been enough to close the gap. The forecast workforce of 2.68 million in 2030 is still below the 2019 peak of 2.83 million.

So the need for tradespeople looks like it will only grow, particularly with the infrastructure and housing programmes the UK has planned. That is the good news.

Will everyone piling in oversaturate it?#

This is the question I keep coming back to. If every worried graduate and teenager decides to become a sparky, does the market flood, and do rates fall?

I do not think the answer is a simple yes or no, but here is how I see it.

The gap is large, and the pipeline is narrow. Checkatrade's research found 88% of trades had not hired an apprentice in the last year, and apprenticeship starts fell from more than 522,000 in 2011 to 354,000 in 2025. CITB points out that most construction firms employ fewer than five people and plan three to six months ahead. A one person firm with a short order book is not in a position to take on and train someone. Interest in the trades is not the same as places to learn them.

So the bottleneck is training, not enthusiasm. A big wave of people who want to join does not create a big wave of competent tradespeople. It takes years, a decent employer or college, and someone willing to teach. Most of the people who say they are interested will not make it all the way through, and that filter keeps the market tighter than the headline numbers suggest.

But some trades will get crowded. Draper found the trades young people most often said they would move into were painting and decorating (32%), electrical (20%), and landscaping (20%). Trades with a low barrier to entry and a lot of casual competition are the ones where pricing pressure shows up first. Trades that need licences, certification, and years of study are more protected.

And a flood of beginners is not a flood of good ones. People will still pay for someone who turns up, does the job properly, and comes back to fix it if something goes wrong. Reputation and reliability do not get commoditised the way a generic service does. My guess is that the people who treat it as a craft rather than a fallback will be fine in a crowded market. The ones who treat it as a fast route to a van and a day rate may find it harder than they were told.

I am not an economist and this is an opinion, not a forecast. If I had to put it in one line: the trades are probably not heading for an overall glut, but the easy-to-enter corners might get competitive, and the way to stay safe is to get properly good.

What I take from all of this#

I do not think everyone should drop what they are doing and retrain as a plumber. The trades are skilled, physical, and demanding, and they deserve better than being treated as a plan B for people who are nervous about AI.

What I do want is for the respect to be real. For the people in my family who do this work, and for everyone like them, I want that respect to show up in how we talk about the work, how it is taught, and what we are willing to pay for it.

And for me, I want to find out whether I can do it. Not as a career change, but as a hobby that leaves something behind. I am going to start small, with a bed in the garden, a bit of timber, and some borrowed advice from people who know what they are doing. If it goes badly, I will have learned why the people who do this for a living are worth every penny.

If you have been where I am, wishing you could build or fix the thing and not knowing where to start, I would love to hear what you did first.

References#

• CITB, Construction Workforce Outlook 2026 to 2030
• CITB, Construction Workforce Outlook, UK report
• Barratt Redrow, Rethinking the Route: why Gen Z are turning towards skilled careers (2026)
• Checkatrade, Young people turning their backs on university as AI reshapes a generation's views on work
• Checkatrade, Backing Britain's tradespeople: from last resort to first choice
• Draper, DXPULSE: Gen Z perceptions of the trade