1:18And should we as workers be responsible for adjusting whether if you got that Harvard degree?
1:52Is that the message for parents watching for 11th graders watching?
5:00Jim, what did you see in China that almost unnerved you in terms of how advanced they were?
6:26And as I told Jim at our last meeting, I'm like, not a week goes by where somebody doesn't call me to say, 'Mike, do you know where the tradesmen are?
Well, the shortages are real. I'm really glad that we get the chance to talk about this on such an important show. You know, at Ford, we have a shortage of factory workers, but we have a shortage of technicians and dealerships. As Mike said, those jobs, even though it takes a while to get up to speed, you know, we have about 400,000 people that we need. Right. This morning at Ford, we had 6,000 stalls that were open with no mechanics in them to fix our vehicles. The jobs are getting harder. They require technical support, innovation. So, I think at Ford we'll solve this problem because we're a fortunate company and we're committed to America. But the issue is what is the little guy going to do? The plumber, electrician that owns our Super Duty. What are they going to do if they don't have the resources at Ford? They're barely getting through the day with a lot of red tape. For them to try to find the next generation, as Mike said, it's really hard. And we have to help them. Companies like Ford have to help. We have a lot more work to do as a whole industry.
You know what they say, Mike? This reminds everybody of 2003 because we changed telecoms. You know, we went from the hardline to the cell phone and we lost maybe 171,000 jobs and everyone reconfigured and readjusted. I don't know if you remember back then, you were probably on PM Magazine, but this is something that you can't blame any party for. This is advancement. Should we be welcoming this? And should we as workers be responsible for adjusting whether if you got that Harvard degree?
I don't think it has much to do practically with whether you welcome it or not. It's standing at the door and it's not going to knock. It's coming in. And yeah, I remember 2003. What I don't remember, but what I'm pretty sure did happen was our country pivoted from an agrarian industry or economy into an industrial age, and from an industrial age really into kind of a financial age. And now we're going from this financial age, whatever that is, into clearly a digital age. And we're building the plane in the air. And there is no playbook for this. I think Jim's challenges and experiences at Ford are similar yet different from say Alex Karp's over at Palantir. Now, what I'm interested in, you know, Alex has his own little meritocracy school that he's building there. He's recruiting great kids straight out of high school and teaching them what he needs them to know. They're also exposing them to the liberal arts, which I just think is brilliant and fascinating. And I know that Jim has talked about building trade schools again within the Ford organization in order to satisfy this need. To me, that's leadership, you know, and each company is going to have to figure out this Rubik's cube in their own way, which is why I don't think there's a general playbook, but it is super interesting to hear how the smart people among us are going to solve this. Hey Jim, before you answer, I have Alex Karp a quote from Palantir CEO and co-founder and he says this AR is going to help many people with vocational training but no college degree make a lot more money because of the value being created. So to tell somebody who gets that master's degree from Yale that you probably would have been better off from high school going to a trade school. Is that the message for parents watching for 11th graders watching?
Yes, it should be. I believe we put too much emphasis on a four-year degree in the United States. If you look back two or three generations, like my grandfather, he got his job at Ford, he put my mom through college, I went through college. You know, we have a whole, as Mike said, you said, we have a whole generation here that has a new opportunity. And I think our society puts such a pressure. Now, Mike has been battling this with everything he's done for many, many years and being a spotlight on this. But now, as he said, it's a real thing. Road construction takes longer, people waiting longer for stuff to get fixed on their house. You know, if we want this to change as a society, we have to ask the question, do we really want to put this much pressure on the next generation to get a four-year degree? This is a live debate in my family. My kid learned welding over the summer as a high schooler, and he asked me, 'Dad, you think it's worth going to college?' The CEO of Ford, my wife and I had a big debate about it. I actually asked Mike about it and I'm buying whatever he wants to do. But as a society, we have to have a debate about this. We can't just get stuck with the direction we're going.
And that explains a lot of the frustration where people are leaning towards socialism. I need some help. I don't have any stability. Well, what if you guarantee me something and what if I had an enemy and it's called successful people? That's the scary answer that uneducated people or ignorant people are making now and making choices. Now, the other thing I want when we talk about innovation, you talk about China. Mike, I'm sure you've talked to Jim about this. Jim, what did you see in China that almost unnerved you in terms of how advanced they were?
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Farley, J. (2025, November 10). Current state of Jobs - November 9, 2025 [Interview transcript]. Hegyichannel. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/409732/
MLA
James Farley. "Current state of Jobs - November 9, 2025." Hegyichannel, 10 Nov. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/409732/.
BibTeX
@misc{farley2025_409732,
author = {James Farley},
title = {Current state of Jobs - November 9, 2025},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Hegyichannel. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {nov},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/409732/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
