If like me, you believe most things in life move in circles, one of the more fascinating ones is the role of education in the workplace.

One of the luckiest breaks I ever got in entering the workforce in 1982 was that you could get into a good job and a decent career, namely broadcasting, with what was then School Certificate and UE. In today's money NCEA level one and two.

And in allowing kids, which is what I was, to enter an industry like this at that level, you were then left largely to your own devices. Determination, professionalism, work ethic, luck, and desire were your tickets to success.

Yes, they trained you, advised you and helped you out. But you were able to get in early and prove yourself.

Since that time, I have watched this industry and most others evolve into workplaces where the polytech and university have become prerequisites. And I have argued these past 35 years and continue to do so, that it's to the industries and many thousands of individual's determent.

Which is why what we are seeing these past few years is so welcome and overdue, higher learning isn't everything. And if ever you wanted proof we have it, a management company has followed a cohort of 19-year-olds who left school between 2003 and 2007 until 2016, when they turned 32.

They found by the age of 28 the apprenticeship trainees were earning $165,000 more than those who had the university degree.

Now, obviously, it isn't to say some careers don’t need traditional higher learning, nor is it to say you chase a job purely for money. But it is to say at long long last the good old-fashioned useful practical work that was so often looked down on, or shunned, is now very much in vogue.

It got so out of hand that you could go to university, get a degree, rack up a debt, and then still be none the wiser as to what you were doing with your life. And no one second guessed it or said you were mad, because you had gone to “university.”

There remains to this day sadly a certain elitism or snobbishness around education, but these income numbers will help quell that. Money speaks, money equals talent, demand, and respect.

It's not the sole determinant, but so much of university education has been backed up by the often unstated feeling that a degree leads to more money, and money is status.

Well no more.

One of the things most of us would have realised in the world of tradies is the good ones are in massive demand, the good ones charge big money, and to put it simply the good ones are loaded and good on them.

And as the trades become hopefully, and permanently, respected as the equal of anything you can do at university, a whole new world will open to new generations of kids, who don’t second guess themselves if they're thinking there is a future in holding a spanner, a hammer, or some pliers.