Opinion: A day with Mike Rowe at Hard Work U

What’s the dirtiest job you’ve had?

Cleaning up manure on a dairy farm. Maintaining and cleaning a freshmen guys’ dormitory. A controlled burn of several hundred acres of prairie land.

Those are just a few examples given at College of the Ozarks while “Dirty Jobs” television show host Mike Rowe visited campus for the school’s Spring Work Ethic Forum.

Of course, Rowe goes to the extreme on the show, inspecting sewers, recycling old mattresses, collecting highway roadkill, chipping concrete and researching snake vomit. He says he’s learned a lot from those jobs and others. Work ethic is one.

But he also grew up with a front-row seat, he says, to a master tradesman – his grandfather – and an apprentice – his dad.

“They woke up clean, and they came home dirty. At the end of the day, a well had been dug or there was electricity where there was none before,” Rowe told the school’s packed gymnasium during his March 28 visit.

Rowe was invited as the convocation speaker, culminating two days of plenary sessions and roundtable discussions with students, alumni and business executives on the subject of work. His summation: “Work is a state of mind.”

It seems Rowe set out to prove that with his show, intermingling gross or grunt work with curiosity and a hunger for learning – and the all-important humor. Rowe maintains those facets are integral to any healthy work in life and implored the students to do similarly.

On the flipside, he’s observed work becoming a “dirty” four-letter word.

“We believe work is the proximate cause of unhappiness,” he said during the on-stage conversation with Nick Sharp, the college’s dean of work education.

Rowe spent time sharing his career journey – which did not have TV show host as a goal – to somewhat reverse-engineer the unhappiness theory he believes is held by much of society.

For starters, the Baltimore native did not inherit the trades gene from his grandfather (the words from his “pops” were “get another toolbox”), and he stuttered as a youth. But as Rowe tells it, he was always willing to try something new – be it working on a construction site to selling infomercial products on QVC or singing for the opera.

For Rowe, it was always “way leads on to way” in his jobs – and yes, he did quote the entire Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken.”

Admittedly preaching to the choir at the so-called Hard Work U – where students work campus jobs to pay for their educational degrees – Rowe encouraged and challenged the students and faculty: “Take the gospel of work into the world and spread it. If not you, then who?”

Oh, and he did another new thing on the C of O campus: “I made fruitcake.”

Yes, Hard Work U put Mike Rowe to work.

Clean jobs
It’s near impossible to have deep discussion around work these days and not consider artificial intelligence.

During a workforce roundtable discussion with local business leaders at C of O, Kurt Theobald of Springfield digital commerce agency Classy Llama was the first to bring it up.

Theobald predicts AI and chatbots will quickly impact society’s so-called clean jobs, pointing to education, medicine, accounting and law.

“It’s the dirty jobs that are most protected from AI,” he said in a subtle reference to Rowe’s visit.

Here’s why: AI, to be successful, needs rules-based or repetitive functions to complete. The human intervention necessary in historically blue-collar jobs isn’t currently rivaled in robotics.

Still, Theobald encouraged the students to keep their eyes ahead on the developing technologies and their correlations to jobs.

“You need to pay attention to AI because it’s going to change almost everything,” he said.

Theobald’s on to something. In Missouri, technology jobs are on the rise, growing by 1.3% in 2022, according to the State of the Tech Workforce produced by CompTIA.

Some key stats in Missouri from CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the information technology industry and workforce:

• 153,419 people work in tech, representing 5.1% of the state’s workforce.
• The median wage of tech jobs is $78,245.
• 11,028 tech businesses operate in the state.
• The tech industry produces a $22.5 billion economic impact, 6.4% of the state’s economy.

The full report and state-by-state breakdown is at CyberStates.org.

Theobald and the company he co-founded are counted in those tech numbers. So, yes, he has reason to be bullish on the future of the industry, but not only in the tech space.

“The internet was seismic in its impact on the world. And we’re still unpacking it,” Theobald concluded. “This is just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg of AI.”

Springfield Business Journal Editorial Vice President Eric Olson can be reached at eolson@sbj.net.