[ ABOUT TRADES NAVIGATOR ]

About Trades Navigator

Our mission

Trades Navigator is a free, plain-language guide to the skilled trades. We cover the full lifecycle from trade exploration through apprenticeship, licensing, starting a business, and continuing education, plus a public-records lookup for any trade school you are considering.

Trades Navigator is part of a three-leg working-class navigation platform. The siblings are Farmer's Navigator (for producers) and VA Navigator (for veterans).

Method in brief

Every number on every page comes from a named government source, and every value is linked back to its primary record. We are a neutral republisher — we never compute our own composite scores or ratings.

What this site is not

  • Not a rating agency.
  • Not a ranking service.
  • Not an accreditor.
  • Not a recommendation engine.
  • Not a referral broker.

Adverse-signal banners on school records appear because the federal record says so — not because we have judged the school.

Independence

Trades Navigator publishes no sponsored content, accepts no affiliate commissions, takes no referral fees from schools, JATCs, contractors, insurers, or software vendors, and pays no party for placement.

We are not a rating agency, not a ranking service, and not an accreditor. We republish what state licensing boards, the U.S. Department of Education, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and CareerOneStop publish, and we link every value to its source. Adverse-signal banners on school records appear because the federal record says so — not because we have judged the school.

Maintained by the Trades Navigator team.

Contact email rolls out with the next release. Last reviewed 2026-05-15.

Learn more

  • Methodology — what we pull, when, how we attribute, what we deliberately don't compute
  • Sources — every dataset we use with license, refresh cadence, and last-fetched timestamp
  • Why no rankings — why TN deliberately does not score, rate, or rank schools, programs, or unions
  • Accessibility — WCAG conformance target + how to report a barrier