Back in the day, one of the best parts of getting a bicycle was the opportunity to customize it. It would break, you would repair it, and typically modify it while you were at it. After a while, that modification took on a life of its own, and you were paying no heed to the old adage of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It may not have been broken, but it could go faster, couldn’t it?
That love of tweaking and building was only the beginning, often times leading to other careers that involved the same creativity and fluid mindset. Kids fixing up bikes turned into teenagers taking apprenticeships and learning trades. Those teenagers grew into manufacturers, welders, electricians and more.
Today, when a kid’s bike breaks they get a new one. When they’re in school, the career paths laid out for them lead to typing rather than building. And while there are many great careers to be found down that path, there will always be those for whom working with their hands is the highest calling. But even for the manufacturers who want to teach these kids, gone are the days of apprenticeships, as regulations concerning workers’ comp and insurance make it cost prohibitive to hire anyone under the age of 18.
Imagine having an innate skill for baseball, but never being given a mitt or being taught to throw and catch. The number of kids with the ability to work with their hands hasn’t decreased, but the opportunities for them to make use of that ability certainly have. Not only are kids not being exposed to more hands-on careers, but when they are, those careers are typically represented as somehow lesser, or not desirable. Combatting all of this—the lack of opportunity, the —is the calling of all manufacturers. It’s on us to make sure that this valuable avenue for creativity and success doesn’t go away.
