Nate Bargatze gave me career advice at a conference — and it matched what 4 CEOs said

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Ben Shimkus

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Nate Bargatze's first jobs weren't fancy.

Pizza deliveryman, valet driver, mover — titles that "were always exactly what the job was," he said.

"I remember going to one house, and they wanted me to go buy them beer," he recalled of his time working for Pizza Hut. "They'd give you a little extra cash, and you'd be like, 'Alright, that's nice.' A little extra $20 in the pocket, and you go."

Bargatze's career is now much more flashy. He's hosted SNL twice, starred in his own Netflix specials, headlined national tours, and is the leading man in Ford ad campaigns.

And that's how Business Insider met Bargatze on Wednesday — at Ford's Accelerate conference. He emceed the Detroit event that brought together business leaders to talk about America's skilled-trades shortage.

We asked Baratze about building a dream career. His response was remarkably similar to what CEOs at the conference were saying — but perhaps with less corporate frou-frou.

Their main piece of advice: Don't expect your first role to be the dream job, and once you find an opening, make the most of it.

A retail beginning?

Linda Hubbard, the CEO of the workwear maker Carhartt, told Business Insider that she had heard from a retail worker who had applied for an analytics role, but Carhartt did not have an opening for him. Instead, he took a job at the company's Detroit retail store — and got his foot in the door.

"He has all of our internal posting access," she said on Wednesday. "So he's now one step ahead, right? He'll meet other people, and, you know what? He may end up loving retail, becoming a store manager, a district manager, and like, all of a sudden, 'I thought I wanted the data position, but maybe I don't.'"

Several other executives used their own career trajectories as an example.

"I wanted to be an investment banker. That was my dream job," David Regnery, CEO of Trane Technologies, an HVAC manufacturing company, said onstage. He hated banking and pivoted to a job on Trane's factory floors. "Here I am, 40 years later. I'm at the same company."

Ford's CEO Jim Farley said he moved up in the company after working on the automaker's factory floor as a time-motion-study expert. Dan Schulman, CEO of Verizon, said he always wanted to be a fireman — and still has dreams of being a rancher. Patti Poppe, PG&E's CEO, started out as an automotive engineer before heading up California's biggest energy utility.

A fast-changing work environment

For the CEOs, their advice carries more urgency than a standard career pep talk. The conference was built around a growing shortage of skilled-trades workers, even as AI leaves many workers wondering which jobs will endure.

A frequently cited stat among the execs: For every five trade workers who retired over the past decade, only two Americans have been ready to pick up the slack.

Meanwhile, executives kept saying they don't know what AI is going to do to our jobs ("The pace of technological change right now is hard to even fathom, and we're right in the middle of it," Schulman said.)

Still, their advice was the same: remain open to whatever opportunities pop up, even if they surprise you. From there, you can build enduring skills.

Bargatze said his comedy career was also built on that premise. He said it started when he booked a contract to do stand-up on a cruise ship. It wasn't the audience he wanted to perform for, but it gave him a stage to test out his material.

"If I have an hour of material that I can rely on, that's something that nobody can take from me. I have this hour," he told Business Insider during a roundtable. "If you know how to build and take apart a car, you have an act, you have something you can use. That's just a giant backstop."

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Ben Shimkus

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Ben Shimkus is a reporter for the Business News desk. He writes about cars, transportation, retail, and jobs. Ben's reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Verge, Automotive News, USA Today, AutoBody News, LGBTQ Nation, TopSpeed, and Out Magazine. He's also held staff writing positions at The U.S. Sun and the Daily Mail. He graduated from NYU with a Master's in journalism in 2024. Email Ben at [email protected] or message him privately on Signal at bshimkus.41. 

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