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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we continue our series on workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes, STARs, Skilled Through Alternative Routes, about how Americans without four-year college degrees are finding pathways to good jobs in today's economy, and the structural challenges that still stand in their way. Opportunities too, though. Millions of jobs in this country are open right now, especially in fields like healthcare, IT, and energy, but many of the people best positioned to fill them, don't even know they exist.

These aren't traditional white collar, or blue collar jobs. They sit somewhere in the middle, and they can offer good living with room for growth, without requiring a bachelor's degree, and that's the puzzle explored by Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber, who writes about workplace issues and employment. She has a recent story headlined, "They Are Hot, Upwardly Mobile Jobs. Here’s Why They Are So Hard to Fill." It follows people like Fatima el Idrissi, a mother of three who now makes $34 an hour sterilizing surgical instruments at a New York hospital, so we'll talk with Lauren about the stories behind these so-called middle skilled jobs, and what it says about how we train, hire, and support workers in the US labor market today, and we'll invite more of your stories in just a minute. Hi, Lauren, and welcome to WNYC.

Lauren Weber: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with your headline, "These Jobs are Hot, Upwardly Mobile, and Hard to Fill." Can you describe what kinds of roles we're talking about beyond what I said in the intro?

Lauren Weber: Sure. I mean, you want to look at the growing industries in this country, and there are things like healthcare, as you mentioned, energy production, information technology, and one thing that's, I think, very challenging to people about the labor market is, it's constantly evolving, so 10 years ago everybody was told, "You have to learn how to code. That's how to future-proof your career."

Well, now, generative AI can do some of that, so even though there are still a lot of jobs open in IT, those might be changing. This is part of the challenge of being a worker today is trying to keep up with that, and find out what roles are available, and then the next piece, how to find the training for them.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, keep helping us report this series. Are you in any of those jobs that Lauren just shouted out, or sectors? Maybe you're a sterile processing tech, a radiologic technician, maybe an air traffic controller. That's one of those jobs. Nuclear techs, IT support specialists, surgical technologists. I'm reading all these terms, I don't even know what half of them are, or other healthcare and tech-adjacent roles.

You can help us report this story, and tell us your story. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Are you working in a well-paying job that didn't require a bachelor's degree, but did require some training, certification, or on-the-job learning? How did you find your way into that career? What helped you? What got in your way? How about advancement once you're in? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's do this profile a little bit, as you do in the article of Fatima el Idrissi, one of the people you profile, who now works in a hospital sterilizing surgical tools. What did it take for her to get that job, and how did she even hear about it?

Lauren Weber: She was a fascinating case, because she illustrated many of the themes I was trying to draw out with the story. She is originally from Morocco. She was-- I think had worked in, and she was doing childcare. After she came to the US, she did have some medical training, but hadn't gotten a job, I think, for like a medical aid type of role.

She was on a Facebook group for Moroccan women in the United States, and saw a post. A woman had made a video, a woman in Arizona, actually, about this role, sterilizing surgical equipment. She had never heard of the job, nor had I when I interviewed the president of LaGuardia Community College, and he mentioned this program, which was the genesis of the story.

Fatima had never heard of the role, and she thought, "Okay, this is interesting. The woman who made the video was making a good living." She did a little Internet research, and found out about the LaGuardia program, but she didn't even want to-- She didn't even really, at that point, take additional steps, because I think she was thinking, "Well, how would I even get a job after that?" This is where the connections piece comes in.

She didn't know anybody in this field, or at hospitals in New York. Eventually, she, a few months later, I think reconsidered, decided to go to an info session at LaGuardia. While she was at the info session, she learned, and this is one of the reasons why I think this program is such a great model. She learned that there is an administrator whose role is primarily to help place students for the internship portion of this job, so she knew she wouldn't be on her own once she completed the training.

At that point, she was willing to take the leap, and did the program. The program itself costs around $1,500 for the classroom portion, which is about 100 hours in the classroom. LaGuardia offers scholarships to most students, I think. Then, there was this critical piece where they would help place her in the internship. At that point, she decided she was going to go for it.

Brian Lehrer: How common is it that people find these jobs through word of mouth, or social media, or spur-of-the-moment Google searches? I think part of your article says that sometimes roles in the categories you're talking about, don't even get advertised directly.

Lauren Weber: Yes, I mean, this was really the heart of the article to me is that there are all these jobs out there. Many of them go unfilled. Many of them are good roles, or good entry level jobs that provide a career path into even better careers, and many people don't even know about them. I mean, most of us are aware of a very small constellation of jobs. They are the jobs that our parents did, or the people we saw around us did.

As a result, I don't think we have any sense of what the broad range of careers that are out there that are available to people, so what ends up happening by default is, people explore careers through, like I said, word of mouth, through doing their own Internet research. One of the women I wrote about in my story who was in the LaGuardia program, had Googled "highest salary with least amount of training," [chuckles] and she ended up at a different program at LaGuardia, and ultimately, ended up in the surgical sterilization one.

It's this very haphazard process, and like I said in the story, these are some of the most critical decisions we make in our lives, and yet, there's really not a very good system for career navigation, and exploration in this country. If you're a young, if you're in high school, you may have a guidance counselor, although I think guidance counselors can't even keep up with the pace of evolution in the labor markets, or the options that you have for training, especially, now that a lot of it is available online. They may know about what's in your local area, but not necessarily everything you can do online.

If you're a high school student, you may have access to some platforms, or tools on the Internet that are proprietary, that can help you do some of this, but it gets even harder for people who are adults, and who want to switch careers, and there's just Very little available to them. That's a piece of this puzzle I wish we were working harder to solve.

Brian Lehrer: Rob in Hicksville, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rob.

Rob: Hey, good morning. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, how are you?

Rob: Yes, I've called before. Great, great. I'm actually-- I serve in the United States Army. I'm a human resources specialist, and I just want to say that many of the jobs that your guest is talking about, we have in the United States army, and they are hard to fill. There's no bachelor's degree required, other than meeting the standards for service, but here in New York City, in the New York City area, I bring home over $100,000 a year for a job that I was trained in. I got paid to train.

I didn't need any requirements other than meeting the standards to join, and the army takes care of us financially, personally, and professionally, so I do have a bachelor's degree now. I'm also working on a master's degree now. I have no student loan debt, and I'm getting my master's degree for free through my service in the military. I don't have a combat-related job.

These are all jobs that are non-combat related. We have healthcare, medical, human resources, and finance, IT, all these jobs are in the military, and there's just a big misconception about what we do on a day-to-day basis, but as a high school senior, all the way up to age 42 years old, you can get one of these jobs with no training, and no bachelor's degree required.

Brian Lehrer: Good job there, Rob, as a recruiter for the army. I think another piece of it, is that the army often trains people, or the military often trains people for some of the kinds of jobs that Lauren Weber from The Wall Street Journal is writing about, that they can then transition to when they get out. Is that right?

Rob: [crosstalk] That's correct, so not only-- Oh, I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Rob, you do it, then we'll-- Lauren will come back to you after. Go ahead, Rob.

Rob: The army trained me. I initially came in as hazmat. Three years in, I switched over to human resources, so the army trained me in human resources. I have training on Oracle, PeopleSoft, some of the software that the civilian world uses, and then the army also allowed me, they paid for me to take a course, and get my certification in my PHR, Professional in Human Resources, so the army paid for that, and allowed me to take the test on my time, so now when I leave the army, I can go to human resources for any company, and I can walk in the door with 10, 15, 20 years of experience, plus, the industry standard certifications, and I paid nothing for it. In fact, I was paid to do it.

Brian Lehrer: Rob, let me leave it there for time, and so we can get some other people on before the end of the segment, but thank you. We really appreciate your call, and thank you for your service. Lauren, I mean, we should acknowledge, of course, he's a recruiter for the army. He makes a very good case there. There are also downsides. We've done a segment previously on how low paying a lot of military jobs are, and the plight of some military wives. Of course, you risk being sent off to war, but there are those upsides that he talks about, and I wonder if that relates to anything you wrote about.

Lauren Weber: Yes, actually, I think the military is probably the largest job training organization in America. Not only are they training people to be soldiers, sailors, et cetera, but the people do get that specific job training. I wrote a story a few years ago after spending a week at the Navy's boot camp outside of Chicago about this aspect of the job training that happens in the military.

One thing that's fascinating about the military is, when you start out or I think when you're entering, you take a test called the ASVAB, Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and it's like a skills and aptitude assessment, and I wish there were something more widespread, because it does give people a sense of what they're capable of, what they have natural talent at. I think one thing that the broader workforce could benefit from, is more really high quality assessments like that, that help people get a sense of where their natural aptitudes lie.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another listener's story. Betty in Hopatcong. You're on WNYC. Hi, Betty.

Betty: Hi. Hi, thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Betty: I attended a hospital-based program 18 months at one of the Atlantic Health facilities in New Jersey, and to train as a cardiovascular technologist, and I specialized in vascular ultrasound, doing all sorts of ultrasound studies in cardiology. Also, so it has-- A vascular technologist does scanning for any sort of circulatory condition, so it could be carotid arteries, blood clots in the legs, arterial disease, kidney disease, liver disease.

It's very extensive, but the level of trust that you develop between your patients, and the doctors, it just-- I really enjoyed the trust that I received from the medical staff on my expertise in these programs. Then, after I finished, I took a registry exam, which is, it's a nationwide registry. After that, I attended at on my own time an online program, because there was only two at the time, two programs in the United States that offered bachelor's degree in vascular technology.

Brian Lehrer: You did ultimately get a-

Betty: One was in Oregon, and one was in Florida. Yes, I ultimately did get my undergraduate degree, but it didn't really-- I didn't want to go into any sort of management, or I really enjoyed exactly what I was doing, so it was only for my own satisfaction.

Brian Lehrer: Betty, thank you very much. I think her story, Lauren, is so representative of what was in your article, because I think one of the things that jumped out at me, even though we're talking about many different kinds of jobs, I won't go through the list again, is that so many are in healthcare.

Lauren Weber: Yes. I mean, it's such a growing industry in this country. People are living longer. People have got more access to health insurance, thanks to Obamacare, and people are having more procedures done, so that really is, when I looked at a long list of about 800 of these middle skilled jobs that was created for me as part of the research for the story, a huge percentage of them were in healthcare.

What was interesting about is, there are so many jobs like the caller was just speaking about, that you wouldn't necessarily-- They're very specialized and very niche, and if people knew more about some of these, they would know-- I think they would have better chance of finding the ones that fit for them, and then, of course, finding the training for them.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap it up, you describe how fragmented and luck-based our current career navigation system is. What might be a more coordinated, accessible system? What would that actually look like?

Lauren Weber: I've been writing about workforce issues for a long time, and I've spoken to many people. There are so many brilliant people in the field of workforce development who are really trying to fix this problem. There are nonprofit organizations, there are startups trying to come up with solutions. This whole issue of career exploration, navigation, connecting people with the training and education, is actually one of those areas where I think technology holds a huge amount of promise.

Like I said earlier, you might have a high school guidance counselor who may be aware of some of the local options for training, but there's no way they can know about everything that's available, especially, when you add in what's available online, and there's no way they can know how to do that for hundreds, or even thousands of occupations, but you can do a lot of that with technology.

What I think would be amazing, and like I said, I think there are a lot of people working on this, is to have platforms that make it easy for people to take assessments to help them identify their skills, their interests, what jobs might fill them. Where you could go in and say, "I can devote six months to some kind of training, and I have this amount of money," and that could then spit out some options for you.

I think what's difficult right now, is that this whole system is very fragmented. There are all these different people and groups working on these things. I wish that either through the big job boards, Indeed, or LinkedIn, places like that, or some kind of a government system that there would be one place where people, or a very small number of places where people would know to go to do these kinds of activities, and get the kind of information they need.

Brian Lehrer: Lauren Weber, who writes about workplace issues, and employment for The Wall Street Journal. We've been talking about her article. "They Are Hot, Upwardly Mobile Jobs. Here's Why They Are So Hard to Fill." It's been the latest installment in our series about making a good living without a college degree. The next one will be tomorrow. Lauren, thank you very much for today. That was excellent.

Lauren Weber: Thank you for having me.

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