People will roll out the trades whenever employment is mentioned, but do you have tradies in your family? Do you have friends who are tradies? It's not easy to get in, it takes a long time to make journeyman, and work can have seriously spotty periods no matter who you are. Fact of the matter is, it's not really an alternative to anything except other types of bluecollar work.
About the same amount of time most people spend in college and at least you're making a little money.
Like anything, it's important to spend time networking and building a reputation for doing high quality work. This gets noticed as it does in any job and will get you better opportunities and better customers.
Trades have a higher percentage of people at the bottom tiers who have trouble showing up for work on time and sober. Avoid being associated with that and you can rise fairly quickly.
It's easy to get a foot in the door to any of the trades but you're gonna slog out 5+yr of doing "bitch work" before you even have a chance to make real money because that's the nature of the licensing systems that these trades have that are enshrined by various degrees of law.