AI & the Skilled Trades: Why Plumbers Now Earn More Than Engineers
- The scene is familiar: unanswered calls, schedules booked for weeks, and an hourly rate that is no longer up for discussion.
- In that same country, a teacher with a doctorate, years of academic training, and an impeccable record earns—measured by effective hourly rate—less than many manual professionals.
- And it’s not an isolated anomaly, but a fundamental signal.
Try finding an electrician on short notice. Or someone to replace your garage door piston. The scene is familiar: unanswered calls, schedules booked for weeks, and an hourly rate that is no longer up for discussion. It’s accepted. Because the alternative is to live with the problem.
In that same country, a teacher with a doctorate, years of academic training, and an impeccable record earns—measured by effective hourly rate—less than many manual professionals.
This isn’t a criticism or a corporate plea. It’s an economic observation. And it’s not an isolated anomaly, but a fundamental signal.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating a profound readjustment of the value of work. In a few years, it has learned to write coherent texts, analyze data, generate reports, prepare marketing campaigns, program functional code, and solve tasks.
Today, a single person supported by AI tools can perform tasks that previously occupied several workers.
Technology doesn’t replace senior talent or strategic judgment. But it eliminates much of the intermediate and repetitive work on which many professional careers were built.
When a skill becomes abundant, its value falls. That’s what’s happening with much of standardized intellectual work.
Meanwhile, the opposite is happening with what cannot be automated or outsourced.
The market has already created its own ranking, albeit an uncomfortable one.
The professions with the most negotiating power are those that currently face shortages, waiting lists, and rising prices.
Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, maintenance technicians, installers, healthcare workers, and caregivers work in physical, unpredictable, and deeply human environments. They don’t scale with an algorithm. They aren’t replaced with a software update.
In Spain, many of these professionals easily exceed €2,500 per month when self-employed or in specialized sectors.
Labor market data confirms this trend: skilled manual trades are among the profiles with the highest average salaries offered and the greatest tension due to a lack of candidates.
Their hourly rate competes with, and often exceeds, that of engineers, IT professionals, or university-educated marketing profiles.
Not because one is worth more than the other, but because scarcity dictates, and immediate utility is rewarded.
This scarcity doesn’t just affect day-to-day domestic life. It also jeopardizes the energy transition and digitalization.
Without professionals capable of adapting buildings and infrastructure, no green plan or digital strategy can truly be implemented.
For decades, a narrative was constructed that identified progress with university education and failure with a trade.
That narrative has generated an inflation of degrees and a silent frustration among many professionals. As well as an alarming lack of essential jobs for the daily functioning of the economy.
From the point of view of system sustainability, the imbalance is evident.
An economy isn’t sustained solely by abstract knowledge, impeccable presentations, or elegant code.
It’s sustained by real capacity to maintain infrastructure, repair what fails, care for people, adapt what exists, and respond to the unexpected.
This shift isn’t limited to Spain. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently highlighted the surging demand for skilled trades in the US and UK, driven by the massive build-out of data centers required to support the AI boom. He stated that hundreds of thousands of electricians, plumbers, and carpenters will be needed annually, with potential earnings exceeding $100,000, plus overtime, without a college degree. , Fortune reported on Huang’s comments.
The demand is so acute that some labor union affiliates are facing data center projects requiring two to four times their current membership, according to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a shortage of roughly 81,000 electricians annually in the US between and . McKinsey estimates that an additional 130,000 trained electricians, 240,000 construction laborers, and 150,000 construction supervisors will be needed in the US between and .
Huang’s perspective aligns with a broader view that the next wave of opportunity lies in the physical side of technology, rather than software. He indicated that if he were 20 again, he would lean toward disciplines rooted in the physical sciences.
The implications are clear: the traditional equation of higher education equaling guaranteed success is being challenged. A re-evaluation of the value of skilled trades is underway, driven by economic necessity and the demands of a rapidly evolving technological landscape. The future may well be wired, but it will be built—and maintained—by those with hands-on skills.