Reality check

Start here, because most of the internet will sell you the fantasy in either direction: the trades as a noble escape from screens, or the trades as a trap for people who could not hack it. Both are marketing.

What is actually true

The money curve inverts. In software you start high and plateau. In the trades you start low and climb for a decade. A first-year apprentice typically earns a set percentage of the journeyperson rate — often somewhere around half — and steps up each level. That means a multi-year income trough. If you have a mortgage priced off a senior developer salary, that trough is the whole decision. Model it in a spreadsheet before you model anything else.

The ceiling is real but it is not a salary. Journeyperson wages are good, not spectacular. The people making serious money in the trades are almost always doing one of three things: working brutal overtime and shutdown work, holding a niche high-consequence ticket, or owning the business. The last one is where your existing skills compound hardest.

Your body is now a depreciating asset. This is the part nobody sends you a Slack message about. Knees, shoulders, backs, hearing, lungs. Some trades are far worse than others — roofing and drywall are not the same career as instrumentation or elevator work. Choose with a thirty-year horizon, not a thirty-day one.

Nobody cares about your GitHub. In your first year you are the person who carries material, sweeps up, and does not touch anything expensive. Ex-professionals struggle with this more than eighteen-year-olds do, because eighteen-year-olds have not spent a decade being asked their opinion. Plan for the status drop as deliberately as you plan for the pay drop.

Completion is not guaranteed. A large share of registered apprentices never finish. The reasons are boringly practical: layoffs, an employer who will not release you for school, money running out during block training, or a bad journeyperson. Read the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum’s research on completion before you assume you will be the exception.

And the demand is genuinely there. This is not a sales pitch — the federal government announced a $6B plan in April 2026 to recruit 80,000–100,000 new Red Seal workers, because the shortage is structural. Aging workforce, housing targets, infrastructure, data centres. If you complete, you will not struggle to work.

The five questions

Answer these in writing. If you cannot answer them, you are not ready — that is fine, it just means the answer is “not yet”.

1. How many months can I fund at roughly half my current income? Not “could I survive” — could my household absorb three to five years of it. Include tools, which you buy yourself and which are not cheap.
2. Which specific trade, in which specific province? “The trades” is not a plan. The compulsory-trade rules, required hours, and wage floors differ across all thirteen jurisdictions.
3. Who is going to employ me? In most Red Seal trades you cannot register as an apprentice until an employer sponsors you. That is the actual bottleneck, and it is why getting hired is a longer chapter here than choosing a trade.
4. Can my body do this at fifty-five? Ask someone who is fifty-five and doing it. Not on Reddit — in person, at a supply house counter.
5. What is the exit? Every good trades career has one: foreman, estimator, inspector, instructor, safety, business owner. Know which one you are aiming at, because the people who never picked one are the ones still swinging a hammer with a wrecked back.

Try before you leap

You can test this in a month without quitting anything.

• Read one Red Seal Occupational Standard cover to cover. Pick a trade from the list and open its standard. It is the complete task inventory for the job, written to build an exam from rather than to recruit you. It is the most honest job description in existence.
• Do twenty sample exam questions from the same trade page. Boredom is data.
• Buy the entry safety tickets yourself. WHMIS and — in Ontario — Working at Heights cost a couple of hundred dollars and a weekend, and they make you legally employable on a site. See tickets. Nothing signals seriousness to a small contractor like already having them.
• Work one Saturday as a labourer. Temp agencies and small contractors will take you. One day of demolition tells you more than a month of research.
• Talk to a second-year apprentice and a fifty-year-old journeyperson. They will tell you two completely different stories. You need both.

If the answer is no

There is an honest middle path that this guide takes seriously: careers that are hands-on and site-based but where your software background is a direct asset rather than a discarded past — building automation, instrumentation and controls, power engineering, non-destructive testing. See where your code still pays and beyond Red Seal.

Leaving software does not have to mean leaving everything you learned in it.