- Today on Careers That Work, we're bringing the heat with the career highlight of an HVAC specialist.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Aaron, I'm the owner and operator of Amp Mechanical in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

So we do everything from plumbing, heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, water heaters.

We're pretty diversified across the blue collar trades as far as mechanical trades go.

(upbeat music) I started out as I had interest in plumbing.

That's what I started out initially as, plumbing.

Plumbing and heating kind of dips into air conditioning.

Yeah, it's probably just condensation coming off the louvres.

And as time went on, I took some evening courses from a local vo-tech for air conditioning, but at the same time I was doing it in the field with people who have been doing it, and I just paid attention.

Take these and pry the doors open.

- Everybody's going to college to be computers, computers, computers, but nothing's blue collar and you can make a good living doing this.

I would say starting salaries for somebody who's fresh, I'm talking you could be between 14 and $20 an hour depending on what you're in.

If you're into a sector of the field where there's more money flowing around, such as, say you're working on cooling equipment for hospitals and if you wanted to go up to be a full-time service tech, there is no doubt, without a question, you could make 80,000 a year plus and have benefits.

(gentle music) Good, close it off.

Let's hook up our high side.

Being good at something pays off.

It pays the bills, it puts food on the table, it provides for your family.

When I was in school, in vocational school, enrollment was very low.

Everybody was technology driven, and a lot of people that I know that went to school and they spent all this money on big colleges and degrees and stuff, they're not using them.

Either they lost interest, the jobs weren't available.

The jobs are available in this trade.

You could have all the artificial intelligence in the world.

When you need a guy to come fix your air conditioning, you're not gonna be able to go on Google and a drone's gonna come by and start hooking gauges up and troubleshooting valves and things like that.

There's always gonna be people behind it.

(gentle music) Growing up, we were poor.

We didn't have anything.

We had to take care of things, make 'em last.

You had to fix things, we had vehicles, and that's kind of where it all started early on, whether it was from fixing my bike, it was just seeing how things work.

And I could look at any air conditioner, any refrigerator, any boiler, and you know the basic concepts of how things work, so that's a talent, and I would love to see more people, and I have some apprentices here that are gonna be learning more and they're early on in their career in it.

And I wouldn't be where I am today if I wasn't mentored by someone else.

Jesse, unlock my truck please.

If you have no air conditioning, and there's only one person in town that does air conditioning, how valuable is that person?

And the less and less people that are doing this, the more and more valuable we're gonna become.

(door slamming) Everything that we end up doing is to save the day, whether it's preventing spoilage of food or you have labs, we have lab accounts, where they're doing biological tests that we have to maintain a climate controlled environment and this equipment will not operate outside of certain parameters.

There is so much you have to learn in this, and you can learn, and once you learn it, nobody can take it from it.

There's a lot of programs available.

You don't have to go to aa big school.

There's vocational schools that offer adult education programs.

It's a good trade to be in.

I love what I do.

I love every moment of it.

Is it chaos?

Yes, but I love it.

I probably won't do anything else the rest of my life.

- So what did you think?

Can you envision yourself in this career path?

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