Training Filled Jobs With Hard To Fill Positions In The Labor Market

I used to think there were no consequences for anything if you were just brave enough to try it. That's the mantra that carried me through a leap I made last year off a lucrative corporate gig six figures, stock options, the whole nine  into the unknown arena of gig work and skill building. I'm Sarah, I was born in 1992 and until October 2024 I worked as a senior product manager at a big tech company in Seattle, earning about $12,000 a month gross (before tax). These days? I'm stringing together random gigs some at $15 an hour, others $100 a day and strapping in some tech classes to prepare me for my next step.

Leaving hadn't been a spur-of-the-moment decision. The tech world had chewed me up and spit me out. And at the time, I was drowning, endless video calls, deadlines that never seemed to end the unstated need to always be on the clock put the life right out of me. I wanted not a flatter life but a deep one, not one that felt like a montage of late-night Slack pings and misery. So, I quit. For the first month, I was out of prison, I went to a coding boot camp, took a welding class at a community college and worked nights as a barista at a trade show for a health care startup. My earnings that month? A measly $1,200 less than I earned in one day.

No doubt losing that corporate income caused pain. The most powerful change, though, was in how minds changed. At 32, I was tumbling from future star to a just another gig worker grinding out enough to get by. You are sacrificing your career, my ex-editor texted me. He might be right. But to stay felt more like I was discarding my mental health.

Here's the thing, though: The U.S. labor market is starving for skilled labor, and I'm not the only one re calibrating. Forbes has it as a conservative figure -- 35 percent of American adults signed on to some form of vocational or skills training programs, IT certifications, factory apprenticeships or health care courses to early 2025. That's a 10 percent increase from 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time LinkedIn conversation around reskill has increased 25% year on year, while across online fora like Reddit, people are sharing stories of signing up for Python classes and trade schools. I spoke with Mike, an online CNC guy who transitioned from retail management to CNC in six months and said it was the best decision he ever made.

Labor: No publishers grant anymore. You're just having them do it for free or through the tip jar.

The gig work I'm doing to tide me over while I learn new skills hasn't always gone smoothly. I scour Indeed and TaskRabbit, launching applications like I cast darts send out 10 and if you're lucky you'll score two bites. They were stale already by the first half of the listings. I've even been the only applicant for Men only jobs, erecting booths for a bridge tech expo in Portland. I'm 5'9, gritty, and down to our grunt work, I pitched. Do you know what time it is? they laughed, but they booked me the gig when it came open at the last minute $120 for the day.

Ana, a 27-year-old event planner from San Francisco, planned the gig. She'd also graduated from U.C.L.A. with a marketing degree but her full-time job was paying only $3,500 a month, a lesser salary than I earned cobbling together my gig income. Her work involved things like wrangling vendors, schlepping equipment and editing promo videos on the fly. Last month, she dragged four suitcases of swag laptops, pamphlets, logo-embroidered bags from San Francisco to a Las Vegas trade fair. She rode with a competitor because her boss wouldn't pay for a ride. I'm one bad day away from walking, she told me over lukewarm coffee in the venue. And sure enough, there she is on X dispensing resignation advice.

That Portland gig had topped out at $150 for the day's work my most profitable gig so far  having expo-goers test drive a health care app. The downside? In your blood, a booth headed by EOD 50 biz cards and a tongue-lashing pack the seats and move those flyer above about me. No lottery or free bicycle to lure the masses, and the papers were mostly returned. And for a brief moment, I felt the specter of corporate career objectives, pressure, the works  navigating its way back in.

And I wasn't the only one who worked in that house. Chris, a 26-year-old from Tacoma, was my partner. He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in civil engineering in 2021, burned out at a design firm by 2023, took the following year off, then jumped into gigs event setups, deliveries, even tire changes at a car race for $200. Seattle's where's it at, he said, crashing on the couch of a friend. He was due to head back to Tacoma soon enough, I'll remind you welcome worn out.

Skills Over Hope: The Multiverse of Opportunity

Chris and I connected through personality quirks I'm an ENFP, he's an INTP. There's no ‘plan' for the dreamers, you know what I mean? And then he laughed, and recounted getting a racing gig for a live ESPN show when he almost took out the screen. Fun stuff except those gigs tend to say guys only and dust me.

Consider a holiday market job I applied for in Seattle's Pioneer Square: $15 an hour, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., food not included. They specified 5-foot-5 or taller, polished and fluent in Spanish. I sent photos and an audio clip of me speaking Spanish (thank God for Duolingo), but another interview was requested. I snapped. I'm killing myself for $15 an hour, and you're pretending it's Wall Street? I heard nothing ghosted. Someone else likely did; labor is cheap these days.

The numbers tell the story. To quote The U.S. Chamber of Commerce report in January 2025 there were 9.5 million job openings and only 6.8 million unemployed for those jobs. The disconnect? Skills. What the world needs is programmers, welders, nurses skills that are not typically included in a traditional bachelor's degree. Community colleges and online education platforms such as Coursera and Udemy are filling that hole with accelerated classes. My friend Lisa ninja'd her way through a little 6-month cyber school, got a $90k gig. I'm in a welding class at Seattle Central College $800 total, $25-an-hour jobs already in my sights.

Not able to make this up. I put up a poll on X: ‘Would you leave a steady job to reskill? Of 1,200 votes, 62% said yes. One said: Gave up accounting at 35 for plumbing training, good call (no loans) Another said: Tried coding, quit too intense. And it's a process that does not look the same for everyone.

Seeking Purpose, Not Just Pay

Since then I've done a bit of volunteering  three days at community center in Tacoma, teaching kids coding. I didn't realize that even those places needed help until I looked. On my first visit, a drenched Friday, parents trickled in for after-school sign-ups. Then I joined Emma, a wide-eyed 19-year-old freshman at Washington State University, who was lugging around sludge books but getting covert lessons in HTML she taught to tweens in lieu of studying, at a Bellevue workshop.

Emma's adrift, though. She's in data science basically, she tells me, got that courtesy of her adviser, not her passions and she's not remotely certain she'll remain in data science whatever happens, or pivot. I'm the oddball in class, she said, as boys orbited her. Dating? Too wiped out, she laughed. She even consulted a career oracle app, which ominously advised her to trust the journey.

Or there's a tiny maker space in Renton run by Tom, a weary former engineer. I went there for a day messing around with 3D printers no money, just a good time. We geek-ed out about soldering and design software before he sped off to a safety course. Swing by again, he called. I'm all in on that pipeline unicorn thing that universities can't recreate.

Risks and Rewards

The day I graduated, in 2014, I chased fun concerts, escape rooms, brunches and money fell through my fingertips. That was disruptive to Tech; in 2020 I was GameStop-ing away nest eggs, worried I'd be penny less by retirement. Well, I have $250,000 in the bank, mostly from my corporate days, although my 401(k) got clobbered from the tech-stock drop last year.

At 32, I see the tightrope. The market is not forgiving of millennial without a niche. But I'm gambling that if I can just learn a trade, learn how to weld, learn how to code, whatever it is, long as I can pay my $2,000 rent I will sober up and I will get on my fucking feet. Big Tech is my Plan B if I don't make it I already crumpled that grit. However, simply contemplating a return to meetings and PowerPoint makes me queasy.

A recruiter wrote me: ‘Hey Sarah, got a PM spot interested? Let me know! The urgency bled through. We're all just cogs searching for an alignment.

A Slow, Steady Climb

Quitting sparked something. I have met more welders, coders and hustlers in two months than I did in four corporate years. These days, I am smiling, and I am here. Chris, messaged me: Work is hard but keep swinging life gives a little for mistakes. He's spot-on. In the skilled hands, 9.5 million jobs, and I'm building mine pipes or code, I'll cross that bridge. If I trip? I have some savings and a cat, Muffin. Life is a hell of a lot kinder than I thought it would be.