Editorial Standards
Below are the working rules for this site, published so that you can hold a page against them and see whether it complies.
Where the facts come from
A figure does not go on a page without the document it came from linked beside it. Pay and employment data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rules about what minors may do come from the Department of Labor and the Code of Federal Regulations. Injury and fatality counts come from BLS and OSHA. Student aid comes from the Department of Education, and consumer protection material from the FTC. Never from another blog, and never from memory.
Vintage is part of the fact. A wage figure carries the month it was surveyed, which on this site is May 2024, and a projection carries its decade, which is 2024 to 2034. That is not fussiness. Two live vintages of the same series exist at any moment, and quietly blending them is how a number that was accurate once ends up circulating for a decade after it stopped being accurate.
Annual openings run alongside growth percent. Growth percent is the figure everyone quotes and the weaker of the two. Most of the hiring in the trades comes from retirement and turnover rather than from newly created positions, so annual openings is much closer to what someone entering the field will actually meet.
A missing figure is reported as missing. Nobody publishes a reliable national average for first-year apprentice pay, for a starter tool kit, or for trade school tuition. Rather than inventing one, the tools here open with those fields empty and tell you where your own local number lives.
The do-not-print list
Several of the most quotable numbers in this subject fall apart on inspection, so they are barred:
- Journeyman wage figures dressed up as BLS data. BLS does not break wages out by licence level.
- “The country needs this many more electricians” shortage headlines. Those are industry hiring intentions, not net job growth, and they double-count against the BLS openings figure. The shortage gets described here in sentences instead of in a borrowed number.
- Apprentice pay given as a fixed share of journeyworker scale. The real ladder exists only in each programme’s own written standards.
- AI exposure quoted as a percentage of jobs. Most of the circulating versions fuse two different measurements, which roughly doubles the result.
Dates and mistakes
The checked date is a claim about work, not about editing. It moves on the day somebody sits down and re-reads the sources behind that page. Fixing a typo does not move it. That distinction is most of what the date is worth.
A correction leaves a mark. Errors are repaired rather than quietly deleted, the date is reset, and where the repair changes what the page was telling you, a line saying so stays on the page permanently. Send anything wrong to contact.
The higher bar on safety
The readers here are parents of minors who may end up near live conductors, open trenches, confined spaces, hot work and heights. Pages touching any of that carry extra rules. No task is ever called permitted for a minor without the age and the exemption status stated in the same breath. A hazard built into the work is never rewritten as somebody being careless. The legal right to refuse dangerous work is narrow, and it is never inflated here into something broader than it is.
None of it amounts to safety training, and none of it is legal advice.
Markup
The build emits Article, BreadcrumbList, Organization and ProfilePage only. No FAQ or HowTo, because those rich results were withdrawn and the code is now dead weight. Above all, no review or rating markup on the author’s own titles, since review markup controlled by the seller is a well-documented path to a manual penalty.
How the books are allowed to appear
The site and the books have one author. That fact sits in the footer of every page, on the about page, on the books page, and inside the box itself on any page where a title comes up.
The constraints on that box: one per page at most, always beneath the sources, never in the top half of the page, and never standing where an answer should be. A page that holds its answer back to sell a book is a doorway page and would deserve everything that happens to it.