Hmm. If you want to move out of labor type jobs, you need to have the education necessary for employers to responsibly hire you. Even where you have employees for many years that are super qualified otherwise, there is a shallow top to the level many can ever really attain in comparison to degreed (and thus supposedly qualified) individuals. You see this everywhere.
Many of my friends who are degreed engineers run into this in many companies (hyster, intel, boeing), as a bachelors degree is considered only good enough to get them into a working position (maybe). You need an MBA or a masters to ever get into management and even that's slim. Forget upper management unless you went ivy league mba.
It's total bull shit, but it seems to be the way of corporate world (and thus high paychecks $$$).