I've seen a few people I've grown up with try doing skilled trades.
First, they seem to ignore that there is still education needed. And most people who claimed they were going skilled trades ended up doing low skilled manual labor.
And second, they overvalue their education. I've had people claim their skills were good enough to call them an engineer. (But if you give them a real world engineering question, they don't make an attempt)
Third, I've seen fantastic technicians, able to solder a board-mount LED by hand saved us literally thousands of dollars. There is value here, but this person was physically talented from decades of experience.
For a couple of semesters I roomed with a guy taking an electrical engineering technician course at a college while I was taking an electrical engineering degree at a university.
We were both surprised at how similar many of our courses were. The big difference was that the standards for pass/fail were lower at his, and that he didn't have any of the 300 or 400 level courses where all the interesting stuff was IMO. And I didn't have any of the hands on courses that was the interesting stuff in his opinion. He had an advanced soldering course. I had an "optional" 3 hour tutorial in it -- it was optional in the sense that you didn't have to attend, but you'd fail your labs if you couldn't solder...
And that's where you have this divide of people who have an EE degree but can't assemble their own designs to save their lives, and those with just a technical background who may struggle to design and understand their own circuits, but who can build them to expert level standards.
There are plenty in the middle who can do both - and more than a few of them with such knowledge have never take a college or university course in their life.
You see the same thing with software engineering sometimes - the CompSci graduate who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag even if given a github of fizzbuzz, versus the person who never went to college yet makes 6-figs in SV hacking on code (yet doesn't have the "book understanding" of data structures or algorithms).
...and tons of people in between those who can combine both.
Slap 'em together with similar people in the trades - well, you'll find yourself a myriad of people at all levels and understanding of "mechatronics" and/or robotics and such.
It is quite likely that your roommate could learn what you learned - and you could (or have) learned what he knew. It ultimately all depends on having the motivation and desire to pursue it.
Where you might have the advantage is that you could probably pick up his skills from online resources and simple practice projects or whatnot. He would probably struggle to do the same, without actually going into debt and attending some kind of university course(s). Some of it can be approximated with self-study and some online MOOC training, but not all of it, unfortunately - and he wouldn't have the "piece of paper" at the end.
solder a board-mount LED by hand ... physically talented from decades of experience
These days most people use ovens and solder paste with laser cut stencils, which make this stuff mostly about the tedium of ordering, identifying and placing components on the board with tweezers. The solder self-corrects. There is thus little physical skill required in SMT style soldering, at least at moderate component sizes.
Source: I trained my company from scratch to the point where we can turn over new prototype quantity boards in 2-3 days (including design, fab, receipt, assembly). Nobody has decades of experience.
First, they seem to ignore that there is still education needed. And most people who claimed they were going skilled trades ended up doing low skilled manual labor.
And second, they overvalue their education. I've had people claim their skills were good enough to call them an engineer. (But if you give them a real world engineering question, they don't make an attempt)
Third, I've seen fantastic technicians, able to solder a board-mount LED by hand saved us literally thousands of dollars. There is value here, but this person was physically talented from decades of experience.