Workforce development

You cannot optimise a process you have never run

Every workshop has someone who is supposed to know. Most of the time that person is either a welder with preferences or an engineer with theory, and the owner is caught between the two because the two of them disagree. What the industry is short of is the third thing: the person who has done it, can still do it, and can prove it with a helmet on.

Graham Fry, Welder | International Welding Engineer

I call that person the key welding person. It is my term, and I will come back to why I needed one. The short version is that the industry has many names for overlapping jobs and not one of them describes the role that actually matters.

What I mean by the key welding person

Welding supervisor. Coordinator. IWE. Inspector. Responsible welding coordinator, which ISO 14731 actually deleted as a defined term in the 2019 edition, even though half the industry still says it every day.

It covers the same ground as:

• Welding supervisor to AS 2214.1:2024 or AS 1796:2022 Certificate 10
• Welding coordinator under IIW and ISO, at IWS, IWT or IWE level
• Welding inspector: CSWIP 3.1 or 3.2.1, AWS CWI, IIW IWI-B or IWI-S, AS 1796 Certificate 11, or the inspector qualification now inside AS 2214.1
• Welding supervisor to AWS QC13, the American CWS

Holding one of those does not make someone competent for the role. Not holding one does not make them incompetent either. That sentence is the whole argument, and most of the industry has it backwards.

What competence actually means, in writing

This is not my opinion. It is written down in two places that matter, and both of them say the same thing.

Note what the key words are in that definition. Apply. And achieve. Not hold, not attend, not pass. ISO 9001 does not define competence at all, it just requires it at clause 7.2, on the basis of “education, training, or experience”. Any one of the three.

Our own law says it even more plainly. The Work Health and Safety Regulations, not the Act, set out what a competent person is. In South Australia it is regulation 5, and the general case reads:

Training, qualification or experience. Any one of the three, and experience is sitting right there in the list with the other two. The regulator was not confused about this. Where it wanted more, it said so: the same regulation 5 carries six task specific definitions ahead of that general one, and for an asbestos clearance inspection it demands a named VET certification or a tertiary qualification in terms. It knows how to require a ticket. For everything else, it did not.

So the two documents the industry quotes at each other both define competence as something you demonstrate, and our safety law explicitly allows experience alone to get you there. Training and qualifications are valuable. They are not the same thing as competence, and the industry has this wrong in more ways than one.

Not one of these tickets requires you to be able to weld

AS 1796 Certificate 10 used to require a welding ticket. That has been diluted away, to the industry’s detriment. None of the other qualifications require you to be able to weld at all. That is the problem.

Sources, in row order: ISO 14731:2019 cl 6.1 and 6.2. AS 2214.1 examination as administered, from the examining bodies. AS 1796:2022 Cert 10 prerequisites. IAB-252r5-19 section I.3. AWS CWI Part B Book of Specifications. CSWIP-WI-6-92, 17th ed, June 2024, section 2.2.2 and Appendix 1.

Two things in that table are worth pulling out.

The first is in the IIW’s own guideline, and I will quote it because paraphrasing would look like I was loading it:

The second is the pattern underneath the whole table. IWP, the lowest rung on the IIW ladder, is the only level that requires you to prove you can weld, because its access conditions are built on a valid ISO 9606 welder qualification. Climb above it and that requirement disappears. The higher you go in welding coordination, the less you are asked to demonstrate about welding.

ISO 14731 is not ignorant of the distinction either. Clause 3.5 defines a skill as the ability to apply knowledge and experience to complete tasks and solve problems, and notes that skills are either cognitive or practical, practical meaning manual dexterity and the use of methods, materials and tools. The standard defines manual dexterity. Then it never asks for any.

Why that matters, and it is not about pride

You cannot manage or optimise a process by reading about it alone.

Optimising welding means knowing where the limits are, and you find them by doing. Not the limits printed in the brochure, the real ones. How far you can push travel speed on that joint before solidification cracking becomes an issue. What the arc looks like when it is outside its optimal range. Whether that wire will actually run out of position at the voltage the book says, on that machine, with that gas, on that material, consistently.

Nobody learns the edge of an envelope from the middle of a textbook. You learn it by going past it, repeatedly, and watching what breaks. That is what twenty years on the tools buys you, and there is no shortcut to it.

Which is why the decision that costs a fab shop the most money is almost never a technical question with a lookup answer. It is a judgement about whether a change will hold up in production, and the only people who can make that call quickly and be right are the ones who have run the process themselves and built the know how.

The two voices in the owner’s ear

Here is the gap, and I have seen it plenty of times. The business owner gets led by one of two things: what the welder says, or what the IWE read. Neither of them is the key welding person.

The welder knows what works for the welder. That is real knowledge and it is worth having, but it comes with preferences attached, and a preference is not an optimum. Ask why the shop runs that wire and the honest answer is often that somebody liked it in 2014. It is what they are comfortable with.

The engineer knows what the standard says and what the textbook predicts. Also real, also worth having. But an IWE or IWT who spends most of the week in an office is not going to tell you that the reason the root keeps failing is that the welder has not allowed for the increased stickout.

I have seen this from both ends. I have written specifications for multinationals and specified the qualifications, only to find that in most cases the people holding those qualifications were not the key welding person on the job. The person actually managing product quality was out in the workshop, very often with no certificate at all, and they just knew what they were doing and could fix what was not working.

So who are they

A competent key welding person with genuine know how of welding and fabrication. Specifically, someone who:

• Decides the most efficient way to weld something, and is right often enough to be trusted with it
• Sets the equipment up, and knows why those settings work, not just what the book says
• Evaluates consumables instead of reordering what is already on the shelf
• Gets any welding process humming, then optimises it by finding the limits
• Can read the arc and the weld pool, and makes changes based on those observations
• Troubleshoots it when it goes wrong, on the floor, that shift
• Trains the welders and leads by example

They have to be one of the best welders in the workshop. Someone who can walk up to any machine and understand it from first principles of the process. Who can put the helmet on and produce an RT or UT compliant butt with most processes without batting an eyelid, preferably in position.

That last one is not vanity. It is the thing that settles arguments. When a new method goes in and the response is “that won’t work”, the key welding person is the one who can prove it will, just by doing it. All of the BS stops when you prove it absolutely can be done, because you just did it.

And when a welder is failing UT or RT, they are the one who can correct the technique, because they can see what the hands are doing wrong, know what needs tweaking, and can show the right version rather than describe it.

Try leading that conversation from a desk. It does not work. Authority on a shop floor is earned by demonstration, and there is no paperwork substitute for it.

Where the evidence runs out, and I would rather say so

There is no published study showing that a welding supervisor who can weld produces better welds than one who cannot. I looked for it. It does not exist.

The nearest thing is general management research, and it measures something else. Artz, Goodall and Oswald found that whether a worker believes the boss could do the worker’s job is the strongest single predictor of job satisfaction in their data, a coefficient of about 0.13 with a t statistic over 5. That is about credibility with the crew, not about weld quality, and it is the worker’s perception rather than a tested ability. Lazear, Shaw and Stanton found the main thing a good boss does is teach.

So treat the argument in this article as thirty years of my own observation, backed by what the standards do and do not require, and not as a thing somebody has measured. What I can tell you from direct experience is that workshops without a key welding person are exposed.

What is verified here, and what is my judgement

Verified

• ISO 9000:2015 clause 3.10.4 and ISO/IEC 17024:2012 clause 3.6, identical wording. ISO 9001 does not define competence; clause 7.2 is the requirement.
• Work Health and Safety Regulations 2012 (SA) regulation 5, paragraph (g), and the six task specific definitions ahead of it. The definition is in the Regulations, not the Act.
• ISO 14731:2019 clauses 3.5, 5.1, 6.1 and 6.2. No practical ability required of welding coordination personnel at any level.
• The AS 1796:2022 Certificate 10 entry routes, including the engineering or metallurgy route that requires no welding ability.
• IAB-252r5-19 section I.3, the 60 hour breakdown, the simulator allowance and the process by process exemption. IWP is the only IIW level built on an ISO 9606 welder qualification.
• AWS CWI Part B uses moulded plastic replica specimens. CSWIP 3.1 is eight specimens in 90 minutes, no welding.
• Austroads ATS 5410 clauses 7.17, 13.4 and 13.5. DIT SA ST-SS-S1 Revision 1, 30 September 2024, clause 7.6.

Not verified, and marked as such

• AS 2214.1:2024 itself. The entry criteria and two paper examination structure quoted here come from the examining bodies, and most of that material predates the 2024 edition. Read your own licensed copy before relying on it.
• The ISO 14731 clause wording was read from a national adoption of EN ISO 14731:2019 rather than an ISO issued copy. Check it against AS/NZS ISO 14731:2020 before quoting at clause level.

My judgement, not evidence

• The term “key welding person” itself. Mine. It does not appear in ISO 14731, ISO 3834, EN 1090-2, EN 15085, AS/NZS 5131 or any certification scheme document. I am not trying to sneak it past anybody. It is a gap.
• That hands on ability is necessary rather than merely useful in this role. Thirty years of watching it, locally and globally, and no controlled trial behind it.
• That the industry has a know how shortage rather than a qualification shortage.

What I want to happen

More tradespeople in this role. That is the whole point of writing it down. We need genuine career pathways that value, respect and use the know how tradespeople already hold. Crossing the chasm from shop floor to welding management is not well documented.

If we want to grow the industry we need to clearly articulate the paths that are available, to attract more people and drive down costs through efficiency.

The reason I needed a new description is that this is the current gap in most workshops, and part of the solution is simply recognising the problem. We have plenty of people who can quote a clause. We are short of people who can quote the clause and then go and prove it with a helmet on, and genuinely manage welding.

Those people exist already. They are on the floor right now, in most shops, and they came up through the school of hard yards rather than a classroom. What they are missing is the standards knowledge, the written exam and the title, and all three of those can be taught to somebody who already has the know how.

The reverse is much harder. You can teach a tradesperson to read AS/NZS 1554.1. Teaching an office to run a root is a longer job.

I want to build the bridge by providing the tools, the context and the discourse to help tradies cross the chasm, from shop floor to key welding person. That crossing can be confronting, challenging, and to many insurmountable. I know, because I have faced it more than once myself.

So if you are running a fab shop, go and find out who your current or future key welding person actually is. It will not necessarily be the one whose certificate is on the wall. Then work out what you need to do to support them in becoming your most valuable asset.

And if you are the tradie on the shop floor that everybody already asks, you are most of the way there.