Week 16 · Lesson 1
Education and Certification Pathways
Week 16 of 23 · Education and Certification Pathways
What do you already know how to do that nobody ever wrote down?
Something. Everybody in here can do something that took real skill to learn.
Fix things. Move product and keep the count straight in your head. Read a room in three seconds. Manage people older than you. Talk somebody down. Run an operation where being wrong once costs everything.
None of it is on paper anywhere, and paper is the only thing most doors read.
Key ConceptYou Are Not Starting From Zero, You Are Starting From Unrecorded
People walk into this thinking they have nothing. That is not true and believing it is what makes somebody take the worst option available.
What you have is real skill with no record attached. The whole job of the next few years is turning what you can already do into something a stranger can verify without knowing you.
That is what a certification is. It is not education. It is a stranger’s way of trusting you before he has met you.
A card in your wallet does what your word cannot do yet, which is speak for you in a room you are not in.
Journal Question
Write three things you can already do that took skill. Do not filter it. Then write what the legal version of each one would be called.
Teaching PointFour Doors and What Each One Costs
If you can still get back in, this is the widest door and it costs the most time. Everything else in life gets easier with it and nothing gets easier without it.
Four tests. Not a year, four tests, and you can take them one at a time and keep the ones you pass. Most people who have avoided this for years are avoiding a feeling about school, not the actual work.
Ten hours to a safety card that gets you on a construction site. A food handler card in a day that gets you into a kitchen. Neither is a career. Both are a legal paycheck in weeks instead of years, and a paycheck buys you the time to go get something bigger.
You get paid while you learn. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, welding, diesel. It takes years and it ends with a skill that pays for the rest of your life and cannot be taken by a bad economy.
Activity
Four doors. Write which one is realistic for you in the next ninety days. Not the best one. The realistic one. Then write the first phone call or visit that door requires.
ScenarioThe Application Question
There is a box on a lot of applications and everybody knows which one.
Here is what people get wrong about it. They either lie, which ends everything the day it comes back, or they see the box and stop filling it out, which ends everything that same day.
The move is neither. It is answering it plainly, in one sentence, with what has changed since, and having somebody who will pick up a phone and say something about you.
Some places will still say no. That is real and it is not fair and it will happen more than once. But there are employers who hire on purpose, and there are trades where a supervisor cares about whether you show up and can learn, and finding those is not luck. It is knowing who to ask.
You do not need every door. You need one, and then that one becomes the reference for the next.
Spiritual Takeaway
Everything he learned in the worst places is what qualified him
Joseph got sold by his own brothers into a house in a country he did not know, working for a man named Potiphar. He was a slave and he ran that entire household, because he was good at it.
Then a woman lied on him and he went to prison for something he did not do. And in prison, the same thing happened. He ended up running things inside, because he was good at it there too.
Then he interpreted a dream for a man who got out and forgot him for two full years.
And when he finally stood in front of Pharaoh, understand what he had. He had years of running a big household, years of managing people inside a prison, and a gift God gave him. Everything he did in the worst rooms he was ever in is what made him ready for the biggest one.
Nothing he learned in those places went to waste. Not one skill.
Later he told his brothers what they meant for evil, God meant for good. He did not say it stopped being evil. He said God used it anyway and did not let those years be nothing.
One phone call or one visit toward the door you picked. Find out when the next test is, or when the class starts, or who runs the apprenticeship. One call. Write down what they told you.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 16 Lesson