A $100,000 A Year Job, No College Required? Factories Say Kids Don’t Want Manufacturing Jobs

A $100,000 a year job after ten years with no student debt required? Sound too good to be true, like something you’d find floating in your spam filter?

It appears that $100,000 a year jobs are rife for the eventual taking in the US… the catch? They’re in the unsexy manufacturing sector, an industry that has taken many hits to hiring and workforce in the past two decades as work has increasingly been outsourced to countries where costs to manufacture are lower.

Still, in this economic climate, a six-figure job with no experience needed to start sounds like an utter fairytale. How many college grads waiting tables and struggling to get out from under a pile of student debt costlier than three of their parents’ first houses would jump at the chance to seize such an opportunity, even if it means leaving their field of choice?

Not many, to hear machinists tell it. While the promise of a good salary and a field with — get this — 600,000 vacancies awaits, they say young kids that fit the job profile for a machinist perfectly don’t have an interest in the perhaps less-than-exciting work despite the near-guarantee of job security, on the job training and stability.

Machinist Joe Sedlak owns the Chesapeake Machine Company in Baltimore. Sedlak says that there are plenty of jobs available for “kids” (he does not mention whether older workers are as desirable in the field) when he speaks to CNN Money, but he also complains young people just aren’t interested in manufacturing jobs:

“When I was an apprentice in the late ’70s, kids were dying to get into manufacturing. There were plenty of factory jobs… There are jobs for the taking today. But kids don’t want them.”

Commenters on the story express that $100,000 a year jobs seem like a pie in the sky dream, and that factory jobs — when they can be found — pay $8 to $10 if you’re lucky. Mach Molds’ Bill Mach, of Michigan, blames poor PR for disinterest in factory jobs — he says that whenever his industry is represented in the media, it usually is just “an old dark building with a bird flying out of it, and something bad happens.”

Sedlak says aspiring machinists can do an apprenticeship for a year or two and at the five-year mark, be halfway to a six-figure salary. He says that if workers last to the doable ten-year point, a $100,000 salary is achievable due to scarcity of skilled machinists.

Do you think more people need to look to jobs in the manufacturing sector to achieve the American dream?