If the amount "spent" would be $500.00 for me if my labor and burden rate in the shop was billed at $50.00 per hour and I trained for 10 hours then this does not compare to the same amount of training time in an education environment.

I don't know how much the educational organizations spend but I don't think they figure in "time off the floor".

It seems to me that if industry was more closely involved with public education their dollars could be better applied to training a workforce. Of course then they would need to compete with others in industry to obtain the labor. If they hire lesser skilled people, train them "their way" than they get more value. I think!




Good Day

Gerald Austin
http://www.weldinginspectionsvcs.com/

The main reason for my post was to see if any trade schools out there in welder training land were operating with a $150k to $200k budget. Over the past five years my company has had the giant task of having to train and test nearly 250 newly hired employees in order to replace our aged and now retired workforce. These welders had 35 to 45 years of experience and they had earned the right to retire early. Five years ago, when I transferred here out of field construction and into manufacturing, 60% to 65% of our 560 member workforce was either eligible to retire or very soon eligible to retire. We are now down to about 12% to 15% remaining that could retire in the next five years or so.

I don't know how much you may know about northeast Mississippi, but it is not very populated and thus we didn't have the luxury of a large pool of people experienced in industrial, construction, or manufacturing welding to replace this exiting workforce. There was no way in the world that the surrounding community colleges and vocational schools could have even come close to supplying us the qualified personnel we needed initially to fill our needs. And so it was that I and my weld specialists here at this plant worked two shifts, five days a week, 8 hours per day on solid welder training and testing on an average of 20 days per welder and for up to 20 welders in the lab per shift at a time just to get them "qualified" enough to go and begin working on our product. Believe me I can go on and on about the number of tests and all kinds of issues we have had to endure in order to get good help.

Fellow tradesmen welders, inspectors, engineers...you probably know just as well as I do that it takes a certain period of time for an individual to become skilled in welding. So in some ways I feel that we have pulled off a miracle when we can take people off the street who oftentimes have marginal welding training and in a compressed 20 day period we have them ready to weld with the SMAW, GMAW, and
FCAW welding processes; carbon, stainless, and inconel materials; unlimited thickness ranges and diameters in each process; plate and pipe; and then provide mock-up training for certain of our product lines. All total, each of our welders must pass 13 weld tests to be able to become "welder" in our plant.

Now, to be quite fair, not all of these people are "welders" when they come out of our weld lab and I most certainly will never make that claim to my managers nor anywhere in public. The fact is that most of these guys and gals are still rod burners/wire consumers. Not everyone can make the claim to fame that they are a welder, truly until they gain that thing called experience. And that magic length of time to become experienced is certainly greater than 20 days or 90 days. There is a big reason that there are skilled welding trade apprenticeship programs that last four and five years.

All of our welder training has taken place over the past five years and my company has spent an un-godly amount of money training and testing these welders. And by the looks of our remaining work force, we're not finished yet. But is it truly a company's responsibility to have to endure all of these costs associated with welder training? Could these welders not have been trained sufficiently at the vocational/technological education institutions so that I didn't have to retrain them when they show up at my door? What ever happened to the "make or break" welding tests? Why do we as a company have to train people how to read a tape? Or a blueprint? Or perform simple
shop math?

So my point to posting the original message was not so much a plea for help in training the welders as it was a complaint that I have when it comes to welder training and education. I don't think that there are too many places in the world that would have to have an operating budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually as we have had to endure. Maybe I'm all wet, but I don't think so. I'm not talking facility and equipment overhead in these numbers either....just labor hours we had to spend on each welder and for my weld specialists and my time plus the test materials we used for the training and final testing. How many schools have that kind of money? Better question yet, how many would like to but couldn't because their institution would take the money and apply it to some other "better" program? How many company's can even think about having to take that kind
of money out of operating budgets to support such a program and still remain competitive and still make money?

I apologize for the length of my post....I hope you can tell that I am
quite impassioned with this thing called welding. It has been my life....it
has made me a very good living....and I hate to see the trade seemingly
disintegrate from existence because of a lack of understanding from those who should know better, the education system. And no, I am not educator bashing here...please do not take it as such. The "problems" generally lie way before the secondary and post secondary educator ever gets involved.

There are some good schools around the country which I have had the opportunity to see first hand and they work hard to preserve the trade, and if you are associated with one keep it up...do us proud. But there are far more out there who seem to be quite content with their little 1 year certificate program and whose final test consists of being graded on how well they made their barbeque grill or utility trailer. Nothing inherently wrong with that providing there is a major boom in the marketplace to sell these things. Could these be the welders that were a dime a dozen I heard so much about 10 years or so ago?

And finally, it is totally unacceptable for the school systems to pass through the grades individuals lacking in simple shop math/tape skills and who had been the schools worst misfits having no better place to go than in welding or metal trades just for the sake of getting them out of their hair.

Anyone else experiencing the same afflictions?

Following up on my above comments.

It seem that some people in the education community don't realize that "Voc-Tech" school is not the place for training kids/adults that couldn't learn other subjects and utilize the environment for training individuals to work in a well paying field.

If I could have a program in which I could have the attention of teenagers interested in obtaining skills to get a job and use curriculum that applies to todays work environment, I think those individuals would have no trouble finding work.

The school that I went to recently shut down the welding program. This same school has a radio brodcasting class, shoe repair, recording studio and the OH SO IMPORTANT COMPUTER CLASS. In my opinion these things are hobbies or skills you have to apply to a real job.

Have a good day all

Gerald Austin

Just some suggestions which may or may not be relevant:
1) Our local employers pay for night classes in our program for employees
2) Could you take your senior welders and set up mentor type training "on floor"
3) Could you hire someone to come in and do video productions for test preparation, pay for the videos once and use them over and over
4) One local business has texts available for checkout and lets employees earn increments in payscale by stdying at home then testing. I realize this would only help with the "theory part" of our trade but it does work for them. The individualized Hoart books would work well for this.
5) set up training for your business with a local school or votech which is hand tailoerd for you. A "business partnership".
These may not help you at all, but I tried.