The Trades Don't Have a Belief Problem Anymore. They Have an Exposure Problem.

The mindset is shifting faster than the system

For most of the last few decades, the message to young people was consistent: go to university, then find stable, white-collar work. New research from Jobber's 2026 Blue Collar Report suggests that message no longer lines up with what parents and Gen Z actually believe — and AI is a big part of why.

Parents have flipped on ROI

Ask parents today which path offers a better return on investment, and the trades win by nearly three to one: 52% say skilled trades, compared with just 18% who say a college degree. That's not a fringe opinion. 93% of parents said they'd financially support a child going to trade school exactly as they would support a four-year degree, and 92% said they'd actively encourage a child interested in a trade to pursue it.

• 51% of parents believe the trades lead to financial independence faster than a traditional degree path
• 47% believe the trades offer stronger entrepreneurship opportunities than a college career
• Long-term job stability, not prestige, is now the top priority parents want for their kids — prestige ranked dead last

AI raised the stakes

Underneath the ROI numbers is a more specific anxiety: AI is making "safe" careers feel a lot less safe. 68% of parents said AI has made them rethink the long-term stability of white-collar work, and 73% said they actively worry about AI's impact on their child's future career.

Gen Z is responding to the same pressure. 76% said it's important to choose a career that's hard to automate, and more Gen Z respondents now say college is not the safest path to job security than say it is — the first time that's flipped since the report began in 2023.

Belief is ahead of exposure

Here's the part that matters most for how we think about Renzo. Attitudes toward the trades really have improved — the share of people who see a stigma around vocational education dropped from 71% to 64% in just the last year. That's real, measurable progress.

But belief isn't the same as access. Most young people still aren't being shown the trades as a real option, early enough to actually weigh it:

• 40% of Gen Z say they learned about the trades too late to seriously consider them
• 50% say no one on their school's staff ever recommended a trade to them
• 55% of parents believe schools still don't take the trades as seriously as university pathways
• 80% of parents believe giving college and the trades equal promotion in schools would lead more students to consider one

Parents changed their minds about the trades faster than schools changed how they talk about them.

Where this leaves us

The old argument — that the trades need to be "destigmatized" — is mostly won. The next one is about visibility: making sure people actually encounter the trades as a real, well-paid, ownership-track career path before they've already committed to something else.

That's the gap Renzo is built around — not convincing people the trades are worth it, but making sure they're shown the option clearly enough, early enough, to choose it for themselves.

Note: the data above comes from a US survey (Jobber's 2026 Blue Collar Report, based on 1,000+ Gen Z respondents and 1,000+ parents of Gen Alpha children). The attitude shift it captures isn't confined to the US — it's one we're seeing echoed everywhere careers get decided.