‘I love telling people that I’m a mechanic’: This Gen Z woman ditched her law aspirations for blue-collar work—and now outearns her friends

Gen Z is getting a little less enchanted by the four-year degree script. Thumbtack’s latest survey found that nearly half of young respondents are already learning a skilled trade or seriously considering one, and 30% said AI has made them more interested in the trades. The anxiety runs deeper than that. More than 80% said it’s harder to build a stable career now than it was just a few years ago, and four in five expect AI to wipe out a lot of traditional entry-level work. Three in four think the trades may be one of the smartest bets their generation can make.

Victoria Madsen is the sort of person those numbers are pointing toward. The 25-year-old starts work before dawn at Sundance Mountain Resort, where she has spent about five years as a lift mechanic. She grew up skiing there, once expected to become a lawyer, and was studying English at Utah Valley University when a seasonal resort job turned into something else. The off-season offer came with training, a free ski pass, and better pay — $3 more an hour than her previous job. That was enough to change her path.

She quit school after realizing the job was already paying more than she expected to earn after graduating. And the work gave her something less abstract than a diploma promise: her own apartment, her first car of her own, and a sense that life had abruptly become real adult life. Madsen says she was the only woman on an all-male crew when she started, but she found the team supportive, and she says more women have since joined both her crew and the conferences she attends.

The broader labor market is shifting too. An Indeed Hiring Lab analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found women now hold more U.S. payroll jobs than men, only the third time that has happened, and two-thirds of the 1.2 million jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026 went to women. But the trades remain one place where young workers are actively defecting from white-collar disappointment. Thumbtack’s trade professionals told a similar story: among those with less than two years in the field, 38% came from corporate or white-collar jobs and 26% moved over after burnout.

Madsen has started telling that story herself. At a career fair at UVU, she stood behind Sundance’s booth and talked to students carrying polished resumes and internship lists who still couldn’t land jobs. She still worries about buying a house or having children someday. But she also knows the demand is there, and that her paycheck is doing a lot of the talking. When she goes out with friends, she says she often buys the first round because she makes more than they do.