The Death of the Corporate Worker: Part 3 - The Rise of Blue Collar Work.
Six months trying to get someone to fit an air source heat pump. Six months. Not because it's particularly harder than any other heating installation, it's because nobody has the qualification to put it in. Most plumbers are already booked solid for the next six months. Why spend time getting certified when you're turning down work? The few that already have the qualification set their price. £2,500 per day we were quoted. Still haven't found anyone.
This perfectly captures the moment. Six months of calls. Endless voicemails. The qualified installers know their worth. Meanwhile, my friends with masters degrees fight for jobs that might disappear next year.
The numbers paint a harrowing picture. There are 25.6 million homes in the UK. The average plumber is over 50. The construction industry needs 937,000 new workers by 2032. At the same time, tech companies secured £2.9 billion in UK investment last year, most of it going toward AI that replaces knowledge workers.
Corporate work scales infinitely, one AI model replaces a thousand analysts. Physical reality doesn't scale. Every broken boiler needs human hands. Every faulty wire needs human expertise.
Our generation of knowledge workers is navigating unprecedented career volatility. We're experiencing automation and AI disrupting roles faster than previous generations. Trained for linear progression in an era demanding constant pivots. Promised that good degrees guaranteed good careers, only to graduate into the gig economy and endless restructures.
I see it everywhere. Friends in finance watching algorithms do analysis they spent years learning. Consultants seeing AI produce better decks in minutes. Developers realising that coding might not be the safe bet they thought.
Work is splitting into two surviving categories: practical and personal. If your job involves fixing physical things or genuine human connection, you're probably safe. Everything else, the vast middle of knowledge work, is vulnerable.
Some of my friends are diving deeper into specialisation, betting they can stay ahead of the machines. Others pivot to coaching, therapy, anything requiring emotional intelligence. A few even consider trades, though starting plumbing at 30 with student loans isn't realistic.
Most are just stuck. Watching. Waiting. Adding vague buzzwords to their LinkedIn profiles. Every gathering eventually turns to the same topic, who's been laid off, who's pivoting, who's still pretending everything's fine.
The next generation will probably figure this out. They'll watch graduates struggle for £25k entry jobs while apprentice electricians start at more. They'll see what happened to us and adjust. But we're not the next generation. We're this one, caught between what we were promised and what's actually happening.
The housing crisis brings it into focus. 221,000 new homes last year, each needing plumbers, electricians, carpenters. Plus maintenance forever. The physical world makes constant demands that no amount of AI can meet. Yet we trained a generation for abstraction, not reality.
Parents now talk about their children learning "practical skills." Friends discuss backup plans that would have seemed ridiculous five years ago. The shift is happening, just slowly.
Most displaced knowledge workers won't become tradespeople. The transition is too hard, too late. Instead, we'll adapt within our constraints. Some will manage machines. Some will serve humans directly. Many will accept less to stay employed.
For those caught in this shift, which is most of us, the real challenge is understanding what kind of work we're actually suited for. School taught us to chase prestige, follow templates, want what everyone wanted. It never taught us to understand our own wiring. What energises versus drains us. How we actually work versus how we think we should work.
That's the crucial skill now. Not coding. Not prompt engineering. Understanding yourself clearly enough to navigate a landscape that changes faster than any career guide can track.
The plumber charging whatever they want doesn't need to figure out their next move. But knowledge workers watching their roles evaporate do. They need to understand what human elements can't be automated. What they're genuinely good at versus what they forced themselves to learn. What work actually fits how their brain operates.
The death of the corporate worker reveals what we should have known all along, that chasing external markers of success without understanding internal drivers was always going to end badly. We just thought we had more time.
Most of us don't know what actually suits us. We never had to. The path was clear, the progression linear, the expectations obvious. Now it's all uncertain. And uncertainty demands self-knowledge.
Check out the rest of the series here: Part 1, Part 2…
Building Truenorth, the AI career coach for smart people who still don't know what they want to be when they grow up.
Any young person I talk to who expresses an interest in entrepreneurship, I mention the trades. People are always going to need their toilets to run, their hair cut, their locks to work. People like electricity. Get into a business with never ending demand, do it well, you’re going to be okay financially.
What I find sad is how much the education system still shades the trades. It’s a bad look and I hope more young people see through that. Massive red flag for higher ed to turn its nose up at the trades.
So much of this resonates. We built entire systems around abstract skills and prestige instead of practical needs and personal wiring. As someone who leans on interpretive tools in leadership, I keep coming back to this: if the systems we build don’t connect to real people, they won’t last. Meaning matters. Connection matters. We can’t automate our way out of that.