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The Skilled Trades Shortage Is Real. Robots Aren't Fixing It
The skilled trades shortage runs to roughly 400,000 openings a year in a few occupations alone, while humanoid robots are deployed at nine customer sites.
Add up the annual job openings in five skilled trades using Bureau of Labor Statistics projections and you get about 400,000 a year: 72,700 for electricians, 51,900 for industrial machinery mechanics, 40,300 for welders, 30,400 for machinists and tool and die makers, and 214,500 for heavy truck drivers. Now add up humanoid robot deployments. Agility Robotics, which makes what IEEE Spectrum called possibly the first humanoid robot worker that is truly safe, disclosed roughly $1.8 million in revenue and Digit units running at nine customer sites in a September 2026 SEC filing. The skilled trades shortage is a 400,000-per-year problem being met with a nine-site solution, and pretending otherwise does your kid no favors in either direction.
Key Takeaways
- BLS projects roughly 400,000 annual openings across electricians, industrial machinery mechanics, welders, machinists and heavy truck drivers combined, mostly from retirement rather than growth.
- Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026: 1.8 metres tall, 129 kilograms, a 23-kilogram payload at 2.1 metres, and 20-plus hours of operation per day.
- IEEE Spectrum reported Digit’s service pricing at an estimated $8,500 per month, which is roughly $102,000 a year, above the median wage of every trade in this article except industrial production manager.
- The automation that is working targets structured, repetitive material handling. The shortage is concentrated in diagnostic and field work, which is a different problem.
- Apprenticeship remains the most underused path: BLS describes electrician training as a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship with 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training per year.
What the skilled trades shortage numbers actually say
A shortage shows up in federal data as openings, not as growth. That distinction trips up almost every conversation about this topic. An occupation can be shrinking and still desperate for people, because the people in it are retiring faster than it is shrinking.
Machinists are the clean example. BLS projects the combined machinist and tool-and-die occupation to decline 1 percent from 2025 to 2035, from 344,900 jobs. And it still expects about 30,400 openings every year over that decade, which BLS attributes to replacing workers who retire or move on. Thirty thousand openings a year in a declining field. Over ten years, that is 304,000 hires into an occupation that shrinks slightly.
Electricians are the growth example: 821,000 jobs in 2025, 9 percent projected growth, about 72,700 openings a year, and a median wage of $63,190 in May 2025. Industrial machinery mechanics and millwrights sit at 547,300 jobs with 14 percent projected growth, about 51,900 annual openings, and a $64,100 median.
| Trade | Median pay (May 2025) | Jobs (2025) | Growth to 2035 | Annual openings | Why it resists automation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electricians | $63,190 | 821,000 | +9% | ~72,700 | Unstructured spaces, code compliance, live diagnosis |
| Industrial machinery mechanics and millwrights | $64,100 | 547,300 | +14% | ~51,900 | Fault diagnosis on machines that each fail differently |
| Welders, cutters, solderers, brazers | $53,750 | 437,700 | +2% | ~40,300 | Field repair positions and joint access vary constantly |
| Machinists and tool and die makers | $58,750 / $64,050 | 344,900 | −1% | ~30,400 | Setup, fixturing and judgment at micrometer tolerances |
| Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers | $58,640 | 2,221,200 | +4% | ~214,500 | Loading, securing cargo, inspections, exception handling |
| Electro-mechanical and mechatronics technicians | $73,900 | 15,700 | +3% | ~1,400 | Small occupation, high skill, bottleneck for everything above |
That last row is worth staring at. Only 15,700 mechatronics technicians in the entire United States, generating about 1,400 openings a year. These are the people who maintain automated and robotic equipment. If automation expands aggressively, this occupation is the constraint on the expansion, and it is tiny.
What the robots can and cannot do, as of autumn 2026
Let us be precise instead of rhetorical, because the specifications are public.
IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman reported on September 15, 2026 that Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5: 1.8 metres tall, 129 kilograms, carrying 23 kilograms at a height of 2.1 metres, with 20-plus hours of operation per day. Its safety approach is behavioral rather than barrier-based. Agility told Spectrum that “as a person approaches Digit, Digit will put down whatever it’s carrying and then if necessary make sure that it’s stably seated on the ground before that person gets near.” Ackerman’s assessment was that this makes it “physically impossible for Digit to fall over on anyone, ever.”
The economics in that article: service pricing estimated at $8,500 per month, with potential annual savings around $100,000 per robot compared with human labor at $30.50 per hour. Work through that. A fully loaded $30.50 per hour over 2,080 hours is about $63,400 for one shift. A $100,000 annual saving against an $8,500-per-month cost implies the robot is being compared against roughly two to three shifts of coverage, which matches the 20-plus hours of daily operation. The math only closes on a job that runs around the clock and never changes.
Which tells you exactly which jobs are in scope. Moving totes from a conveyor to a cart, repeatedly, in a building with a flat floor and known lighting. That is real work and real value. It is also not what an electrician, a millwright or a field welder does.
Meanwhile, The Robot Report’s roundup of September 2026, published October 1, records the broader picture: Boston Dynamics opened a Robotics Metaplant Application Center in Georgia to integrate Atlas robots into Hyundai’s automotive manufacturing, SoftBank agreed to acquire the Robotics and AI Institute from Hyundai Motor Group, Qualcomm agreed to acquire PickNik, and Unitree Robotics stock fell roughly 40 percent from its August 19 IPO debut. Capital is moving fast. Deployment is moving slowly. Both are true.
NIOSH gives the background trend: the number of industrial robots in U.S. factories grew by 10 percent in 2022, and service robots sold for professional use in the United States rose to 158,000 units in 2022, a 48 percent increase. Robots are spreading. They are spreading into structured tasks.
Why diagnosis is the hard part, not strength
The intuition most people have is that trades are physical and robots are strong, so robots will take them. That inverts the actual difficulty.
Consider what an industrial machinery mechanic does when a packaging line stops. BLS lists the duties: read technical manuals, disassemble machinery when there is a problem, test and repair broken parts, run diagnostic tests, adjust and calibrate equipment to specifications. The hard part is none of the lifting. The hard part is that a line can stop for forty different reasons, the symptom looks the same for several of them, and the fastest path to the cause depends on what broke last month and which supplier changed a part.
That is a reasoning problem with sparse data, performed under time pressure, in a physical environment that was never designed for a machine to navigate. An electrician in an attic, a welder under a truck chassis, a millwright inside a press frame: all of them are working in geometry no designer anticipated.
Meanwhile, the jobs within reach of current automation are the ones where the environment was designed for the machine. Which is why a humanoid in a warehouse aisle is a credible 2026 product and a humanoid rewiring a basement panel is not. We went through the broader version of this argument in whether trade jobs are safe from AI.
What to do at home
Treat apprenticeship as a first choice, not a fallback
BLS describes electrician training as a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship with 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training annually plus classroom instruction in electrical theory, blueprint reading, mathematics, code requirements and safety. That is an earn-while-you-learn structure with no tuition debt and a licensed credential at the end. Families who rank it below a four-year degree by default are making a financial decision without doing the arithmetic, and our comparison of trade school and college returns lays out the numbers.
Push toward the hybrid roles, not the pure ones
The most valuable version of a trade in 2027 is the person who can do the physical work and read the control system. A millwright who can also interrogate a PLC, a welder who can run a weld-inspection ultrasonic test, an electrician who can commission a variable frequency drive. Those hybrids are scarce and they set their own rates.
Ask about the retirement cliff at any shop you visit
When you tour a plant or a job shop, ask what percentage of the maintenance crew is over 55. The answers are often startling and they are the most honest demand signal available. Employers who have thought about succession planning will tell you. Employers who have not will reveal that too.
Learn the licensing map in your own state
Electrical and plumbing licensure is state-level and the requirements differ meaningfully: hours of documented experience, exam content, reciprocity with neighboring states. A family that understands this map early can plan a teenager’s hours deliberately instead of discovering a gap at twenty-two.
What not to do
Do not use robots as a reason to steer a kid away from the trades, and do not pretend automation is irrelevant either. Both errors come from the same mistake: treating “the trades” as one thing. Repetitive indoor material handling is being automated now. Diagnostic and field work is not close. A kid who picks the second category is making a better bet than a kid who picks the first, and that is a real conversation worth having rather than a slogan.
What to Watch For Over the Next 3 Months
- Week 4: Watch whether Agility’s nine customer sites becomes a larger number in its next disclosure. The company filed an SEC S-4 in connection with a SPAC merger, which means its deployment and revenue figures will keep becoming public, and that is unusually good data in a field full of demo videos.
- Month 2 red flags: Any humanoid announcement measured in units produced rather than units working. UBTECH’s claim, reported by IEEE Spectrum on September 18, 2026, that one humanoid rolls off its line every ten minutes and that production scaled from 1,000 to 10,000 units in under nine months, is a manufacturing number. It says nothing about whether those robots are doing paid work.
- Month 3 self-check: Ask your teenager which costs more per year, Digit at $8,500 per month or a first-year apprentice electrician. Then ask which one can diagnose a nuisance breaker trip. The two answers together are the entire strategic picture.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the skilled trades shortage real or is it a recruiting pitch?
It shows up in federal projections as openings. BLS projects roughly 72,700 annual openings for electricians, 51,900 for industrial machinery mechanics, 40,300 for welders and 214,500 for heavy truck drivers. Those are replacement-driven numbers from the government’s own model, not industry marketing.
Which trade is most protected from automation?
Industrial machinery maintenance and field electrical work, for the same reason: both are diagnostic work in unstructured spaces. BLS projects 14 percent growth for industrial machinery mechanics and millwrights through 2035, the fastest in this group, which is consistent with an economy adding more machines that need fixing.
Do the trades pay enough to be worth it without a degree?
Compare medians. Electricians at $63,190 and industrial machinery mechanics at $64,100 in May 2025, against a bachelor’s-degree occupation like logisticians at $82,320. The trades start earning years earlier with no tuition, which closes much of that gap over a career, though it varies enormously by region and union status.
Will humanoid robots get cheap enough to change this?
Possibly, and the price points are moving. The Robot Report noted Unitree’s G1 humanoid at $13,500 and a startup called Flourish announcing a Raspberry Pi-powered wheeled humanoid at $3,555. But a cheap humanoid that cannot diagnose a fault is not a substitute for a mechanic. Price is not the binding constraint. Capability is.
What should a 16-year-old do this year if they are interested?
Find a pre-apprenticeship or a summer job at a shop, and start logging hours. Many state licensing boards count documented experience from before formal apprenticeship. Also take the math, because electrical theory and tolerance work are both arithmetic-heavy and the people who struggle in apprenticeship usually struggle there first.
About the author
Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). “Electricians.” Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). “Industrial Machinery Mechanics, Machinery Maintenance Workers, and Millwrights.” Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/industrial-machinery-mechanics-and-maintenance-workers-and-millwrights.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). “Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers” and “Machinists and Tool and Die Makers.” Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers-and-brazers.htm
- Ackerman, E. (2026). “Digit 5 May Be the First Humanoid Robot Worker That’s Truly Safe.” IEEE Spectrum, September 15, 2026. https://spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-robot-safety
- The Robot Report. (2026). “Top 10 robotics stories of September 2026.” October 1, 2026. https://www.therobotreport.com/top-10-robotics-stories-of-september-2026/
- National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. “Center for Occupational Robotics Research.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/robotics/about/index.html
- Ackerman, E. (2026). “Video Friday: Two Birotors Make a Quadrotor.” IEEE Spectrum, September 18, 2026. https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-quadrotor-from-birotor
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). “Electro-Mechanical and Mechatronics Technologists and Technicians.” Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electro-mechanical-technicians.htm
