It was the early 1990s, and the United States was seeing its grip on the sport of basketball slipping away worldwide. The amateur players that the U.S. would send to Olympics and world championship events were starting to lose to teams across the world.
To reverse the momentum and re-assert their dominance, the U.S. started sending its professional legends like Michael Jordan and Larry Bird to the Olympics to show the world who was the boss in world basketball.
A few years ago, in the trades world Americans were losing skills competitions to foreign countries in competitions that included plumbing and HVAC events. At the time, careers in trades were not appealing to the younger generation, a crisis that’s affected institutional and commercial facilities, who are struggling to find quality front-line technicians.
A group of interested American organizations set out to help the younger generation find quality careers and set that same group up on a path to success compared to their peers around the world.
“The U.S. was losing to countries that didn’t even have working plumbing,” says Dan Quinonez, who is the educational foundation executive director for the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association (PHCC).
PHCC is part of a group that is looking to reverse that trend. They have teamed up with a local pipefitters union and the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO) to train an aspiring tradesperson to represent the U.S. at the 2026 WorldSkills competition in Shanghai, China.
WorldSkills brings together young people, industry, education and government leaders to support technical education and training. The competitors will vie for international honors in skill competitions to show off their trade skills.
This year’s representative is Charles Goede of Watertown, Connecticut, who is learning the plumbing industry as a 19-year-old. Goede’s interest in a career in trades dates to his freshman year of high school.
“That was when I decided that plumbing was where I see myself succeeding and enjoying a career in the trades,” Goede says.
Among his peers, Goede’s career path seemed to be dwindling in interest. But signs are increasing that the trades are re-emerging as a popular option as careers for students coming out of high school who aren’t interested in attending a four-year college and the accumulating debt that often accompanies the experience.
Many companies are taking the lead in trying to find the next generation of skills workers, investing in community college programs to fund students’ education paths into careers in HVAC, plumbing, lighting, security and building automation. Quinonez is among those who are starting to see those efforts pay off.
“The last 10 years, we have seen the seismic shift of people who have gone to college,” he says. “Yes, they graduate to get those white-collar jobs, but they’re still making the same money after 10, 15, 20 years and if there’s a recession, some of them lose their jobs.
“They’re also seeing they took massive student loans to pay for their education. They had a wonderful four years, and then see this massive debt is strangling them.”
In addition to the message of higher wages, one of the messages that Quinonez likes to share with prospective trade students is industry job security. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to impact other industries in increasingly different ways, the threats of some jobs being lost to technology are real.
“Tens of thousands of workers are being let go because they’re basically being replaced by a robot,” he says. “On the flip side, you can come to plumbing and HVAC and be welcomed into the trades. ... And you start seeing you can make $90,000 to $100,000 a year after being in the system only a few years.”
Goede is in many ways a “Dream Team” type example of the potential of a career in trades. He is the first competitor to be named to the WorldSkills USA delegation. He graduated from a technical high school in Groton, Connecticut, and was a state SkillsUSA champion and finished second in the nation in a plumbing competition.
Only a teenager, Goede already seems to have a solid career plan. When asked where he sees himself a decade or two from now, he responds, “in 10 years, I’m definitely going to be running some bigger jobs, with bigger crews as a superintendent.
“In 20 years, it can be anything from being a general foreman or running my own mechanical company.”
Dave Lubach is the chief editor of the facilities market. He has a decade of experience writing about facilities management and maintenance issues.
