Tired of the corporate grind? A welder's torch may be your ticket

Christofer Matney spent 20 years climbing the rungs of the fast-paced international business world, rising to chief flight recruiter at Indianapolis’s airport, only to walk away in the prime of his career to become a welder.

Sarah Leyendecker made an equally jarring transition from special education teacher to butcher.

And Andrew Green, former chief financial officer for a materials testing company with more than 200 employees, now fixes refrigerators and dishwashers as the owner of a Mr. Appliance franchise in east Texas.

All say they’re much happier after leaving behind the politics, stress and 24-7 mindset of the corporate world for blue-collar jobs.

“I’m in a much healthier long-term situation now” Matney, 48, says, even though his paycheck was roughly halved. “It was about getting a quality of life.”

White-collar workers are by no means stampeding to blue-collar jobs, but at least a few are upending traditional career ladders by trading in three-piece suits for aprons and factory uniforms. In the first quarter of this year, 2% of all the white-collar workers who switched jobs went to blue-collar occupations, according to the ADP Research Institute. That’s not much but it’s up from 1.4% in the first quarter of 2015.

By contrast, about 6% of all blue-collar job switchers landed white-collar positions, ADP says. And why not? A Bachelors degree, which is required for most white-collar jobs, still confers about an $18,000 average earnings premium for 25- to 34-year-olds, compared with a high school diploma, according to the Census Bureau and student loan consultant Mark Kantrowitz.

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Yet many blue-collar fields pay more than the U.S. median of $44,000. Median pay is about $51,500 for a plumber and $46,000 for a heating and air-conditioning installer, Labor Department figures show, and those salaries can increase sharply with overtime pay.

Such occupations also offer seemingly boundless opportunities. An oft-lamented “skills gap” is afflicting industries like manufacturing and construction that can’t find enough skilled workers to fill openings as Baby Boomers retire. From 2015 to 2025, manufacturers are expected to have 3.5 million job openings but only 1.5 million workers are projected to stream into the field, says Gardner Carrick, vice president of the Manufacturing Institute, the industry’s training arm.

Mike Bidwell, CEO of Dwyer Group, a service franchise company, says 75% of Mr. Appliance franchisees came from white-collar jobs last year, up from 31% in 2012, a trend he says is "picking up" across the firm's 17 brands.

Meanwhile, massive layoffs during the Great Recession left fewer white-collar employees with bigger workloads, leading to more burnout. Fifteen percent of human resource executives at companies with more than 2,500 employees say burnout causes at least 50% of annual turnover, according to a survey last fall by workforce management firm Kronos and Future Workplace, an HR executive network and research firm.

“People are working longer hours for no additional pay,” says Dan Schawbel, partner in Future Workplace.

Matney “always loved” his flight recruiter job, which involved convincing airlines to bring passenger flights to Indianapolis and local companies to band together to lease space on cargo planes. It was a perennial push to gather data for sales pitches.

“It almost became an addiction,” says Matney, “to look for the next bit of Information to help build your case.”

But, he adds, the job was “all-consuming.”

He routinely checked email on weekends and vacation, and put on 80 pounds as the stress triggered eating binges.

A study of 600 mostly white-collar employees last year found that 55% had a hard time detaching from work “not because of the actual time people spend on email but because the idea that you have to be available creates stress,” says study co-author Liuba Belkin, a business professor at Lehigh University. Blue-collar workers were better able to detach and had better work-family balance, the study found.

In 2014, Matney learned he had dangerously high blood pressure. “A light bulb came on,” he says.”

Two years ago, he saw an ad for a welders' career fair, and enrolled in a three-week course that yielded a job fusing together Toyota forklift parts. A bad day now means making a mistake and slowing the assembly line, he says. "It’s not like an entire six-month project fell down the tubes.” .

It pays about half his former $80,000 salary, and despite his wife’s healthy pay as an energy adviser, the family eats out less often and has supplanted Italian vacations with trips to cities like San Francisco. But he can leave his job at the factory after each shift and finally enjoy his vacations as well as time with his wife and kids.

Some blue-collar converts find ways to transfer their white-collar passions to their new careers.

Lyendecker, 27, the special ed teacher-turned-butcher, says, “I want to still be able to educate people … on the importance of knowing where their food comes from.”

The Corrales, N.M. resident chose her former occupation because her father, who has multiple sclerosis, was often treated poorly and she endured her own struggles in school. “I liked being that person that gave (kids with learning and other disabilities) a little bit of hope,” she says.

But besides teaching, Lyendecker’s  job at a charter school involved lots of  administrative work -- meeting with often-confrontational parents and monitoring other teachers who resented her oversight. “It really wore me down,” she says.

Her boyfriend reminded her that she always dreamed of becoming a butcher. As a child, her parents took her to the butcher shop every Sunday where she was riveted by how he presented, wrapped and stamped the ground beef. She was also fascinated by the cutting required to transform a cow or pig into an appetizing meal. “I think I saw it as an art,” she says.    

Last year she completed an apprenticeship and now volunteers part-time at a meat-processing plant. She plans to buy a meat grinder, sausage packer and large refrigerator so she can butcher animals from her house for local farmers before opening her own shop. Those enterprises ultimately could bring in about $50,000 to $60,000 a year in income, nearly double her teacher salary, she says.

“I want to do my own thing," she says. "If I want to make the T-bone and leave the tenderloin on the bone, I (can) do that.”

Green, 42, the Mr. Appliance franchise owner, says he’s netting more than the few hundred thousand dollars a year he earned as CFO. Although he enjoyed the job, it overtook his life: He worked 100-hour weeks and kept an extra suit in his office closet for the one day a week he toiled through the night.

When a friend offered to sell him an appliance repair franchise for $100,000, he dismissed it. “You work hard so you can pay people to do this.” But when his wife separately raised the idea of buying a service business he became convinced it was God’s plan.

But the transition wasn’t easy. Green accompanied one of his technicians for three years to learn appliance repair. And the way he’s treated by customers when he's in a company uniform compared to his suit-outfitted corporate days has been “very humbling.”

But diagnosing broken appliances is “more challenging than it ever was finding something wrong in accounting,” he says. And, “I feel like I’m providing a service to people that’s very tangible. That refrigerator was broken and I fixed it."

By contrast, when he was striving to grow company revenue as CFO, he sometimes wondered, “What’s the end goal? When is enough enough?”