Gen Z is ditching college for ‘more secure’ trade jobs—but boilermakers and welders actually rank among the worst entry-level jobs

The interesting market read-through is not that trade work is “back,” but that the labor stack is getting re-priced faster than credentialed white-collar work. That creates a medium-term bifurcation: higher wages and tighter labor availability in field services, but also lower productivity at the margin if employers cannot scale with training capacity. The second-order winner is not necessarily the trades themselves, but the enabling ecosystem — vocational training, tool/software distributors, industrial safety, and staffing/dispatch platforms that help contractors squeeze more output from scarcer labor.

For INTU specifically, the story is mixed. A stronger narrative around alternative careers can support small-business formation and self-employment, which is bullish for tax prep, invoicing, payroll, and cash-flow tools over a 12-24 month horizon. But the article also signals that younger cohorts may be more skeptical of the “build your own business” arc if trade income volatility is higher than advertised, which could temper lifetime customer value assumptions in the segment that markets itself to gig and micro-SMB users.

The market is likely underestimating cyclical fragility in labor-heavy trades. If construction/manufacturing roll over for even one or two quarters, the jobs story can reverse quickly because these roles have low switching costs and limited wage insulation compared with licensed professional work. The contrarian point: if AI displaces entry-level office labor faster than expected, trades may still remain a relative winner on adoption, even if absolute job quality is mediocre — meaning the trade-trend thesis is more about relative positioning than durable prosperity.