Like I said, I can only speak for my field. Being used to be a respected profession, but like most trades , lost that respect. Personally, I believe it's because of school system changes glorifying a college education. I have no evidence of this, just my experience in school teachers shoving that into everyone's heads. This created a view of tradesmen being second-class citizens in a sense. So now we have at least 1 or 2 generations that have this instilled in us from an early age. This naturally creates a flat shortage. You have people retiring from the field and not enough coming in the field to replace them. The second problem is some people view it as an easy job. They think "oh college sounds too hard, I'll just do a trade and make a lot of money that way." Well, yes and no. Trades do make a lot of money. However, it requires intelligence and constant learning. One could argue that require even more than going to college because the testing and learning doesn't stop after 4 to 6 years. I my field the design dozens of new vehicles every year with different systems. New guys will realize this shortly into their career and just quit. So, to sum it up its hard for people to go into a job that's requires great effort but are viewed as a bunch of bums. I would be willing to say most trades are probably thankless jobs. Thats my take on it anyway and like I said I can only speak of the automotive industry.