Nicole Bass wants everyone to have access to a stable career path that makes them happy – whether it starts in college, the military or a trade.

Since the pipeline from high school to college or to the military is firmly established, her goal is to help young people learn about the career options available to them and connect them to employers who are hiring in the industries they are considering..

That’s why she founded JoinTheTrades.com

A website crafted to educate people about the successful career paths in the trades industry and connect them with schools and employers that can get them started on their trade career journey.

Karlie talks trade education and career pathing in this episode with the founder of startup website JoinTheTrades.com.

Karlie

This is Trades, Tools and Talks. I’m Karlie Huckels.

There are tons of opportunities for Skilled trade education - you just have to look for them.

That’s why Nicole Bass founded JoinTheTrades.com, as a way for people to explore career options in the trades.

Nicole Bass

This is we're not a placement agency. We're not a recruitment agency. So what we did was we said, okay, well, let's make it a website so that people can make those connections a little bit more naturally. And the biggest component of that is educating on what these trades careers are, because it's not always apparent what different opportunities you have aside from college and the military.

Today we are talking to Nicole Bass, founder of JoinTheTrades.com, about her mission and goals for the site.

That includes education accessibility, trade job assessments, education about the 100s of trade roles available in the world, the importance of trades and of course disparities in the US.

Let’s get into it.

Hi Nicole!

Nicole Bass

Hi Karlie, how are you?

Karlie

I’m good! I’m so excited to be talking to you today. So, what is your history with the trade industry?

Nicole Bass

To start, I was raised by tradespeople. So my step dad is a lineman. My dad's a landscaper, and my grandfather's a lineman. But I started in the trades ten years ago in commercial HVAC as a sales rep. I sold maintenance contracts to big commercial facilities. I worked for a contractor in Atlanta, Georgia, and I worked my way up from sales rep to sales manager to vice president of that organization and that company owned a training organization as well.

Nicole Bass

Karlie

Which one is that?

Nicole Bass

Trade service professional. So we actually have a couple of different logos out there that you might see as a group is one of them. It's a network of contractors across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. And then Sky Academy is our federally approved technician apprenticeship program.

Karlie

How did that lead to join the trades?

Nicole Bass

At this point, we work with, I mean, several dozen contractors across North America and they all have the exact same problem of trying to recruit into the trades, recruit technicians. And for me, it blows my mind because these are high earning careers. Every technician that I have worked with and I've been on a lot of rooftops of commercial facilities or in the basement or whatever, but every technician I work with loves his job or her job.

Nicole Bass

They are making most of the time. Once a year or four or five years in, you're making six figures. Your education was paid for by the contractor. They've got high job satisfaction, stability. You know, that's not to say that it's rainbows all the time, but what career is and and I and I didn't understand how those two added up.

Nicole Bass

How are these techs so happy making such good money and they're not in debt or they're not in student debt, at least. And these companies are having a hard time finding new technicians like that didn't add up to me. You know, you'd think they'd be really highly sought after careers. So I went to where the young people are, which is on TikTok.

Nicole Bass

And I said, Well, you know, I'm just going to maybe spread the news that maybe they don't know that these jobs are out there. So I got made fun of a lot for this, the whole TikTok thing. And so I made it Tik Tok and you know, I jumped up to 80,000 followers pretty quickly of people saying, hey, I didn't didn't know that that job existed.

Nicole Bass

You know, I had a bunch of trades people jumping on my videos, defending and validating all the things I was saying were true. You've got people saying, yeah, I made 140 last year. I made it, you know, and I'm in my mid-twenties. So then because of the response from the Tik Tok channel, we started collecting this database of people saying, Hey, can you help me get started?

Nicole Bass

Initially they were trickling in and I was saying, Okay, yeah, sure. Let me just make an introduction with one of these companies I work with, and we had a couple dozen people placed in different companies, and I started creating this Excel file of people sending me their, you know, their resume, their contact information. And we were like, look, we can't keep up with this.

Nicole Bass

This is we're not a placement agency. We're not a recruitment agency. So what we did was we said, okay, well, let's make it a website so that people can make those connections a little bit more naturally. And the biggest component of that is educating on what these trades careers are, because it's not always apparent what different opportunities you have aside from college and the military.

Nicole Bass

So we're educating. And then that connection piece, I think a lot of people complain about the gatekeeping on how to how do you get into one of these trades jobs. You have to be somebody's cousins, nephew, whatever. So, getting those employers listed just to make those connections is basically how that came about.

Karlie

Plus, you don't have to have a massive spreadsheet anymore. It sounds like it 's an out of Control Excel spreadsheet.

Nicole Bass

It was ridiculous. I mean, it was great. And I loved that we were able to make, you know, play some people into new careers and solve some problems, but it's just not sustainable. Now, with as big as it was growing.

Karlie

Yeah, absolutely not. So your current process is having people go to the website and kind of self-serve. And how did you get into this model?

Nicole Bass

Yeah, I sat down and I you know, it's one of those things you just sort of dream up. We've made a couple of softwares for our industry, so I'm familiar with the user flow and user experience. And I worked with a user interface designer to come up with something that is simple for someone to navigate on these sites.

Nicole Bass

There's a lot of sites out there that educate on the trades, but they're kind of clunky. They've got way too much information and it's not a great user experience. So we were really focused on making it as simple as possible. Go to the site, clearly understand what options there are, and then go dove in as deep as you want to dove as far as learning about those trades and then be able to type in your zip code.

Nicole Bass

And if I'm interested in, say, this small handful of trades, I can type in my zip code and see what opportunities are around me to get started. And maybe it's an employer or maybe it's a school, maybe it's a union, but there are multiple ways to get started and we want to make sure that they're all consolidated into one website.

Nicole Bass

And one of the things that we find to be a problem is this job posting model, this resume job posting model that you see. It doesn't really work for trades careers. So we don't have any job posts on the site. The idea is that if I'm a career seeker, I can educate me, I can go read up on it, I can watch videos, but then whenever I go to search and filter by what I'm interested in, I can filter out by those companies that offer a401k or health benefits or in-house training or, you know, people want to sign up for a culture.

Nicole Bass

They want to sign up for it. Basically, it's like a partner. It's a partnership, right? I'm going to come work for you. But in exchange, what are you going to do for me? And a paycheck just doesn't cut it anymore. People are looking for long term careers. So that's what we're spotlighting for them on the site.

Karlie

And now you said that by zip code. What are the areas that you serve right now?

Nicole Bass

The United States, Canada and Puerto Rico? But we have every intention of making it much larger. And we only started building the site at the end of October. We only put employers on it two weeks ago, something. So yeah, so we're moving really quickly. But you know, we work with the Google API whenever it comes to geo locating where people are.

Nicole Bass

And so Google is everywhere, which makes it possible for us to be everywhere.

Karlie

What is the process for a business together posting on your website?

Nicole Bass

We stuck with Keep It Simple and we've seen so many sites that have attempted to do something similar, but usually with job posts. And if you visit the site as an employer and you click sign up, it is about 10 minutes to set up a profile. Very straightforward. We're going to help you build out your profile. It's one page.

Nicole Bass

Even if you have multiple locations, you only have to create one landing page. And it's not any more complicated than creating a LinkedIn company page where you see the different components of the page and you can click edit to say, All right, here are the perks that we offer, here's our earning potential. And that's actually one of the important things on the site is earning potential in the trades is those that are skewed out there on the interwebs.

Nicole Bass

Nicole Bass

So because that job title doesn't change with each promotion and each pay raise, it skews that average. So we show from 0 to 1 years experience. Here is your minimum maximum earning from 1 to 4, 5 to 9 and then ten plus years and gives you a really much more realistic view of what your career progression could look like.

Nicole Bass

And so we do ask employers to plug that information in. So if you offer this trade, how much do your trades people earn from 0 to 1 years, 2 to 4 or 5 to 9 and ten plus? And that allows us to collect that real data.

Karlie

Next thing that I also didn't have there. But so you have the trade education portion of this as well, getting people connected to trade education. What does that look like?

Nicole Bass

There's two paths to take if you want to join the trades. I mean, two generic paths you've got earn and learn and you have pay to learn. Earn and learn means that you are signing on with somebody who's going to give you a paycheck at the same time as paying for your education. So it's a great option, but your education is going to be dictated by that employer, which means you're not choosing which school you're going to.

Nicole Bass

You're not choosing which lesson they have already outlined, what that education looks like. But you get paid while you do it and it's debt free. The other side of the house is going and choosing your own programs and signing on with a trade school or even you can kind of put union in that category. But yeah, and then you're coming out of pocket to say, I want to get at least an initial certificate associate's degree in this and then go find a job in that trade.

Nicole Bass

So those are the two paths, and we want to make sure that we're not endorsing either path. We're not saying, hey, this is the only way to get started. There's a lot of ways to get started. We're just wanting to make sure that we provide all of those ways on the site. So I as a career seeker, I plug in my zip code, I can see the pay to learn routes that I can take if I want to sign myself up for school, or I can do the earn and learn routes.

Karlie

And so this is I think that's really exciting because, you know, that's useful for teenagers, that's useful for people who are wanting to switch careers. It's not you're not gatekeeping anything with that?

Nicole Bass

No, not at all. And we want to make sure that we're not also being too self-serving. Yes, I work in commercial HVAC, but when we say trades, we mean trades. We mean anything, any solid career path that does not start with college, that can be a hairdresser, that can be a pilot, that can be a chef. There's all of these follow a similar path of usually some type of apprenticeship work under somebody type of program until you are skilled enough yourself to call yourself a skilled tradesman.

Nicole Bass

So this it's an all encompassing site. Whenever we talk about trades.

Karlie

Phrase it and say what features when this is fully live, what features are going to be available for people?

Nicole Bass

Oh, it's a great question. So first and foremost on the home page, they're going to see what we mean by a trade. We want to make sure that there is no confusion on trade. A lot of people think trades equals construction, and that's not true. And then they will have access to an assessment where they can find out what trade might be a good fit for them.

Nicole Bass

And it's not based on competence, it's based on preference. What would make you happy? You know, I took a test when I was younger that said that I would probably make a good lawyer whenever I got older, I would be miserable as a lawyer. It is not a job or a career that interests me at all.

Nicole Bass

I have a lot of respect for lawyers. I would not enjoy it, even though technically I would be competent at it.

Karlie

Mine was health care or data entry and I would have been miserable as well. So I'm right there with you.

Nicole Bass

So our assessment is based on preference, right? Let's narrow it down because you may not realize it, but there's well over 100 trades that we'll be educating on. So narrowing it down for people and maybe getting it within the half dozen range, that might be a good fit for them. There's a lot of questions that you can ask that mix a lot of them.

Nicole Bass

So are you afraid of heights, for example? Okay. Well, if you are, then you probably shouldn't be a pilot and you probably shouldn't be in commercial AC because you're on a lot of rooftops, you know, and there's so there's ways to slim down the list, you know, do you want to work primarily outdoors, indoors or a healthy mix of both?

Nicole Bass

There's a lot of ways to narrow that down, but a lot of it is preference based. And then we'll narrow it down to the trades. That may be a good fit for them. And they can read about those trades, they can read about all of them. But I think the assessment will help kind of fine tune their research and they can read about a day in the life pros and cons, average earning based on years of experience.

Nicole Bass

And then you might be a good fit if from there they can go look for opportunities around their zip code and they could say within 100 miles or within 50 miles, or they can nix the zip code altogether if they just want to see what's out there nationwide because they're willing to move. So being able to filter out by all of that and narrow down the either local employers or local school programs, if you want to do a pay to learn opportunity, the final step would be connecting with those employers or their schools to say Hi.

Nicole Bass

I'd like to interview or I'd like to learn more.

Karlie

Who knows how life would be if we could go back and change? Taking that test, like if we had another option to take a test, an assessment and figure out like, hey, maybe you want to be a landscaper instead because you really like plants. You're good with plants, you want to be out in the sun, but also like, you know, whatever it is, it's.

Nicole Bass

You know, my dad's a great example of that. He's a landscaper, but he owns his own landscaping company. And so people hear landscapers and they immediately think something that is lesser than now. My dad owns his own landscaping company. He loves landscape design. He's an artist at heart and he loves working with Earth and, you know, Mother Nature.

Nicole Bass

So there's definitely a very hippie aspect to that. But but but, you know, but he does very well for himself in that. And he found a career that suits his preferences. I'm sure another test would have said he would have made a great, you know, I don't know, engineer. Maybe. I don't know. But this makes him happy.

Karlie

Yeah. And is there a cost for your website?

Nicole Bass

There is. And there's got to be just to maintain what we want to do with it. But we do want to make sure that it's a level playing field for the mom and pop shops that are looking to hire one person. And then the nationwide organizations who need to fill 800 seats in the next year. So what we did was say, okay, it's going to be per location and it's $20 a month for an employer.

Nicole Bass

So not outrageous and it's passive recruiting for them. They set it up one time and then the career seekers will be reaching out to them. So if you're a larger organization, you have multiple locations. Obviously it's going to cost you a bit more, but you're also looking to hire more people. So it kind of balances that out a little bit.

Nicole Bass

For the career seeker, it's 100% free. We do not want to charge career seekers at all. In fact, you can see everybody without creating a profile. The only reason you would need to create a profile as a career seeker is if you want to submit your information to one of these schools or employers. The whole site is going to be wide open to anybody who wants to look at it.

Nicole Bass

But if you want to get listed on it as an employer, you pay your monthly fee and you can do it month by month if you want. And then if you are a career seeker, then it's free.

Karlie

So what are your future plans for JoinTheTrades?

Nicole Bass

Continuing to develop and evolve the site? When you talk about over 100 trades, that's a lot of research. You know, we started the interview series on YouTube where we're interviewing actual trades people because I can tell you all day long what that trades are about, but it's never going to compare to hearing it from a tradesperson themselves.

Nicole Bass

So we've already interviewed commercial HPC techs, plumbers, and wind turbine technicians. That was really cool. It's a lady who climbs 300 feet in the air to maintain these wind turbines. And she's like, Yeah, I bought my first house at 23 airplane mechanics. So we've got a lot of people coming on. But one tradesperson of that trade is not enough.

Nicole Bass

You know, you want to have several dozen people. So if you're interested in being an airplane mechanic, you can go to our YouTube channel. Look at that playlist and just listen to different trades. People talk about being in that trade that takes some time to build out. And so especially when there's over 100 trades, so we'll continue to pursue that.

Nicole Bass

We'll continue to build out the educational components of the site and bring more people onto it. But then we want to hit the road as well and make sure that we're getting in front of as many young people as possible. And it starts at middle school. Not to say that you have to make a decision at middle school, but you need to start recognizing that there's options out there other than college or the military and begin kind of keeping your eyes and ears open to what may interest you the most.

Nicole Bass

Learning a skilled trade where you have the ability to, with your mind and your body, do things that take a long time to learn. People can't just pick it up overnight, like you have a skill that lends itself pretty easily to entrepreneurship. So, you know, we look at all these people who go in and learn business management, right in college, which is great.

Nicole Bass

But now what you can do is go manage somebody else's business, you know, because you don't have a skill, you can't start your own business. You would have to learn something first and then maybe down the road straight. Whereas if you learn a trade first and then once you get really good at that, if you wanted to do some business management courses to start your own company and do this all on your own and have the wild, independence and freedom to run your own business.

Nicole Bass

Now, I don't want to make that sound like rainbows either, because I run my own business and it's not not to imply that it's not hard work, but there is a freedom to it for sure. And it's almost guaranteed freedom if you're a skilled tradesperson and want to get into that.

Karlie

The things that people struggle with are getting into college and not knowing what you want to do. And that's the thing is like if you choose business management right off the bat and you go for it, good for you. But you know, if you have a path like I had a path I started in health care because I took the time to get health care and then I was like, oh, my God, 8 a.m. Chemistry class.

Karlie

No, thank you. This is a horrifying experience going through all this. So it's just kind of one of those things where you find your path and everyone finds their own path differently. But if you can have different options available to help you find that path, yeah.

Nicole Bass

Let me tell you how simple they make it for you to take out student loans. Right. And I'm sure you've been through it. And I remember being at my college and going into an office and it took me, you know, 10 minutes to sign here, here and here, and you're good to go. And the girl who came in behind me was paying with a check.

Nicole Bass

And it blew my mind that somebody was about to pay for their semester with a check. I just couldn't. I was like, no way. And she was there for as long as I was. I mean, it's so simple. They've made it so easy to go to college. You just sign here, and we don't get a lot of financial education as a young person to say, here's how this impacts you later.

Nicole Bass

Here's what, $800 a month in student loans actually feels like whenever you're only making $50,000 a year, you know? Yeah. And you don't get that education. So we're going to make it as easy to get into the trades as it is to get into college, knowing that both are very successful career paths.

Karlie

I want to know why is the mission of joining the trades important to you?

Nicole Bass

It was important to me to help my customers first, and now that is it's still a part of it, but it's such a small part now that I've seen the reaction from so many people who are struggling to find a balance between work and life, who want.

Karlie

To.

Nicole Bass

Be able to provide for their families, have a good life and have a stable career, but know that college is not the right path for them and they don't want to join the military and they don't really know what their other options are. So it's really become much more of a passion project than anything. Just because you see how many people when you get an 80,000 isn't necessarily a lot for TikTok, but it's quite a bit.

Nicole Bass

And when you see so many comments coming through, not just people who follow me, but just also, you know, randoms coming through saying, wow, I really wish that I had this whenever I was in high school or I really wish I had this today. Or I have two sons who are going to be graduating soon, and I know that college is not a great fit for them and I don't know where to guide them.

Nicole Bass

There's definitely a component of it that's like, look, it's needed for people to be happy in their lives, in their careers. And if I could make that impact, why wouldn't anyone want to do that? And then on the other side of it, the skilled labor gap gets greater every single year where the need to fill these positions is getting stronger and a bit more desperate from a lot of trades, employers and trades industries across the U.S. And it creates real problems for us as a country as well.

Nicole Bass

So I think that it's a win win win. I can't find a negative side to this at all. And I'm just fortunate to have had a good audience and a lot of support and found the right people to help me build it correctly, to educate people on solid, successful career paths that don't start with college and then to connect them with the employers and schools to get them started.

Karlie

What's one thing that people should know about supporting trade, education and career paths?

Nicole Bass

When you say this question over actually just a little sidebar here, but I'm like, gosh, one thing about you, you hear a lot of people say, oh, listen, trades are needed. We need to educate on these career paths because we need the trades. We need tradespeople in order to make this country run. We need is not really a value proposition for somebody looking for their career to say like and I and I kind of made a video about this one.

Nicole Bass

So it was like, look, telling somebody that they should buy your car because you need to sell it is way less attractive than they should buy your car because it's, you know, got great gas mileage and super reliable. You know, you're not selling the car. You're selling what you need. And I hate that that's the dialog and that's the narrative that's being put out there.

Nicole Bass

We need trade people. That doesn't mean anything to career seekers. What does it mean to them? What does that do for their life? If you think about joining the trades, any one of these trades, what does that mean to them? It means stability. It means not going into debt to learn a career path. It means an opportunity for entrepreneurship, but it means a lot of things to them that are not usually touted associated with trades careers.

Nicole Bass

So I think the education on trades careers that needs to happen is more around how wonderful they are and not so much how much we need them, you know, like how much we need tradespeople. It's more about, hey, educate on what great career paths these are and how the average job satisfaction has shown to be much higher for tradespeople than it is for non tradespeople.

Nicole Bass

Educate on why a trades career is valuable and admirable for more than just because we need them. It's not about what we need, it's about what they need as an individual, and this is a great path that will give them what they need.

Karlie

I like how you started it with that. That's not a good value proposition because it's really not like.

Nicole Bass

Well, and you hear people say, one of my favorites is, Oh, nobody wants to work hard and get dirty anymore. Like, I'm sorry, but if you told me, come work hard and get dirty, I'm like, What are my other options? She said, Come on, there's got to be a better value proposition. There's and there's plenty out there. It's just don't use that.

Karlie

And there's a lot of trade jobs that are not dirty jobs like it's not like dirty jobs. You're not going to be getting out in the muck all the time. No, no, no. If you want to be like a kid in a big sandbox and get dirty all the time, you can do interviews.

Nicole Bass

It was with a heavy equipment operator. He was like, Yeah. He goes, What? I wanted to play in the dirt with Tonka trucks when I was a kid. Why wouldn't I want to do that as an adult? This is way fun.

Karlie

Let's. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, there's so many options available and it's not just getting dirty. The last question I have on here is how would you encourage people to be more involved in trades and trade education?

Nicole Bass

I think it starts at home just like everything. You know, if we're trying to change a narrative for an entire country, it's not globally currently it's a US problem. And so if we're trying to change a narrative on the value of a trade career for an entire country, it's not something that happens overnight. It's almost like a campaign. And I do think that that starts at home.

Nicole Bass

I think it starts with parents talking to their children about the different options that are available so that as their kids are growing up, even if they choose the college route, they are aware of the fact that trades careers are equally as acceptable and successful as the college route that they're taking or the military or whatever. So I do think that starts there, but you have to have some resources available to lead them to, which is what I'm working on building.

Nicole Bass

So if they want to learn more about things, they can. But I think changing the narrative to keep focus on the positive instead of working hard and getting dirty instead is worse because we need tradespeople would go a long way and it's not a single person's mission. It's everybody's mission at this point. After three or four decades of the same narrative being pushed, I think it takes a little bit of everybody to turn that around.

Karlie

So that kind of wraps up the questions that I have. But do you have anything else that you think we're missing that we need to expand upon more?

Nicole Bass

You know, I would just encourage everyone to go check out the site, even if it's just so they can tell others about it if they're not in need of a join the trade scheme for themselves or their children, then at least go look at it so you can tell others about it whenever you run into. Inevitably, when you run into somebody who's trying to figure out what they want to do with their life or with their kids' lives.

Karlie

Well, thank you, Nicole.

Nicole Bass

Absolutely. I really appreciate you having me here.

If you are interested in learning more about JoinTheTrades.com, visit the website.

Thanks for listening to Trades, Tools and Talks. The Simpro podcast helping you Work. Smarter.

I’m Karlie Huckels.

Talk to you next time.