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Workforce development
The welding industry does not have a qualification shortage. It has a know how shortage. This is where I write about who actually runs the welding in a workshop, how tradespeople get from the shop floor into welding management, and what the training and certification system does and does not deliver.
Australia has spent a decade trying to solve a welder shortage with policy, aptitude tests and simulators. Meanwhile the people who genuinely hold a fab shop together, the ones everybody already asks, have no documented path into the role that would make best use of them. That path is what this series sets out.
The Step Up series
A weekly run of articles taking a tradesperson from the tools to the key welding person: the mindset shift, the obstacles, the study, the exams, the reporting, and the first ninety days. Written from having done it rather than from having read about it.
You cannot optimise a process you have never run
Not one welding supervisor, coordinator or inspector qualification requires you to be able to weld. What competence actually means in ISO 9000, ISO/IEC 17024 and the WHS Regulations, and why the key welding person has to come off the tools.
Crossing the Chasm
What is actually in the gap between the tools and welding management, and not one item in it is welding. Time and headspace, the three Ds, feeling dumb in a classroom, writing, computers, exams, being marked again. A new instalment added to the page every Sunday.
Related reading
The Making of a Welder
Why a decade of welder shortage policy has failed, who actually becomes a good welder, and why aptitude tests and simulators keep missing. 54 pages, fully referenced.
The Competitiveness Crisis in Australian Steel Fabrication
Lodged with the Productivity Commission. Australian fabrication is not failing on wages and power prices. It is failing on competence and a self-serving certification market.