Pioneer Trading’s Danny Williams says that AI might just work for the window and door industry – but not as you’d expect.

For the past twenty-five years, young people have been told one thing:University equals success.

And that everything else was second best.

That thinking didn’t just appear out of thin air. It was formalised in 1999 when the then Prime Minister Tony Blair set his famous target: 50% of young people should go into higher education. It sounded modern, progressive, and forward-thinking. In reality, it quietly created a two-tier education system that still haunts British industry today.

If you were academic, you were encouraged, funded and celebrated.

If you wanted a trade, you were often treated as someone who had somehow ‘fallen short’.
The result?

A country packed with degrees, but desperately short of practical skills.

Now, suddenly, the narrative is changing. Huge numbers of graduates are under-employed, working in jobs that don’t actually require a degree at all. White-collar workers are drifting away from desks and into the trades. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers. The old cliché is back in fashion:

“Get yourself a trade, son.”

And here’s where the financial reality starts to bite.

The average graduate in England now leaves university with around £53,000 of student debt.

That’s not a mortgage. That’s not a business loan.

That’s the bill for your education before you’ve even earned your first proper salary. Well done Tony, that really helped.
Interest rates on those loans have climbed to around 6% or more, with some plans linked to inflation plus an additional percentage on top.
And the repayment period can stretch for 30 to 40 years before the balance is finally written off.

In other words, it’s not a short-term obligation.

It’s a financial shadow that can hang over someone for most of their working life.
So it’s hardly surprising that many young people are starting to question the value equation. Three years out of the workforce, tens of thousands in debt, interest compounding in the background, and no guarantee of a career at the end of it. For a growing number, the maths just doesn’t add up.
And now along comes artificial intelligence.

Everyone is talking about AI as if it’s going to revolutionise everything. And it will. But not necessarily in the way most people think.
AI is coming for the desk jobs first. Admin roles. Call centres. Basic marketing. Accounts departments. Even parts of sales and design.
The sort of white-collar roles that used to look safe and respectable suddenly don’t look quite so secure.

But you know what AI can’t do? It can’t climb a ladder in the rain in Walsall. It can’t wrestle a warped frame into a wonky aperture in Watford. And it can’t nudge a bay into place after the fabricator cocked up the measurements by 3mm.

In other words, it can’t fit windows.

So while the headlines scream about AI taking jobs, it may actually do something rather unexpected for our sector: Push more young people towards skilled trades.
Because when the choice becomes three years at university, £50,000 plus of debt, a job that AI might replace – OR – a paid apprenticeship, a skill that’s in permanent demand and a work that machines can’t easily do…suddenly the van keys start to look more attractive than the laptop.

For years, the window and door industry has faced a looming crisis. Too few skilled installers. An ageing workforce. Young people steered away from the trades by a system obsessed with degrees.

But if AI trims the white-collar workforce and makes trade skills look like the safer bet, we could see a reversal of that trend.
And wouldn’t that be ironic?

The technology everyone fears could end up solving one of our biggest problems. Not by replacing installers, but by sending more people to become window and door fitters, directly or indirectly.

So perhaps this is the great rebalancing. After decades of pushing half the country into lecture halls, we may finally rediscover something British industry always knew: a good tradesman is worth more than a mediocre graduate.

It appears that the system is finally correcting itself after Tony Blair’s grand university experiment at everyone else’s expense, creating a two-tier education culture, one that quietly labelled apprentices and college-goers as second-class students.

And after being herded into a university education young people carry a financial millstone around their necks even whilst being increasingly unable to put that education towards appropriate employment.

I was never one for saying I told you so… but I did.