The Step Up · Part 2

Crossing the Chasm

Twelve weeks, one instalment a week, on getting from the tools into welding management. Not a list of tickets, and not a sales pitch for a course. The chasm is everything that is not welding: the time you have to take, the drivers that keep you going, feeling dumb in a classroom, writing, computers, exams, and being marked again. Week 1 is below. The rest land each Sunday.

Graham Fry, Welder | International Welding Engineer

Week 1. What stops people is never the welding

Published 11 October 2026

Crossing from the tools into welding management is not a knowledge problem. The content is learnable and you are capable of learning it. What stops people is the hour a week they never find, the first assignment that comes back covered in red pen, and sitting in a room feeling like the only one who does not get it. None of that is insurmountable. All of it is predictable, which means you can prepare for it.

I have watched a lot of people start this and I have watched many stop. Almost none of them stopped because the technical content beat them. They stopped because life got in the way and nothing was holding them to it, or because they got one knock early and read it as proof they were not smart enough.

So before we get anywhere near standards, clauses or exam technique, here is the honest map of what is in front of you. Every one of these has a fix. Most of the fixes are boring, which is why people skip them.

First, the time and the place

This is the one people do not even consider, and it is the one that kills the most attempts as most courses are online now. If you are working long hours you are not going to find study time by hoping a quiet night turns up. It will not. You have to take the time before something else does.

Pick a day. One or two a week, dedicated, and the same ones every week. No matter what is going on, that is an hour or two on the books. The day matters more than the hours do, because what you are really building is a habit, and the habit is what carries you when the motivation runs out around week six.

Then pick the place, and be fussy about it. Home is where good intentions go to die: you walk in, something needs doing, and there is always a reason you will start tomorrow. Work is not much better, because the moment you are on site you are available and somebody will find you.

What I have suggested to students for years is the local library, straight from work, before you go home at all. Free, quiet, power, internet, a desk, and nobody who needs you for anything. Most are open late enough to get there after a shift. Do not discount them because they feel like a school thing.

Think outside the box, create your audio files or mini podcasts, and listen to them on the way to work, at lunchtime, when you go to bed. This is so much more accessible now. When I started I use to record on a cassette tape, and as poor as the quality was it was another few senses that were engaged to help ‘make the info stick’.

Some people are easily distracted at night and sharp at five in the morning. Some are the other way around. It does not matter which, as long as you know which one you are and stop fighting it. Regular, protected, somewhere you can actually think.

Find what works for you, which means try a number of ‘learning environments and methodologies’ and if it stops working, switch it up.

Know your drivers before you need them

You will not reflect on this at the start. Nobody does. You reflect on it about three months in, when it has stopped being new and started being work. That is why it is worth setting down now, while you are still keen.

I have always come at it through three Ds.

Desire is worth a bit more on. If the only driver is money, or somebody else wants this for you, from my experience it tends not to hold up. The first hard week it runs out and you are left with the work and no reason. If you are doing it to prove something to yourself, or to prove it to somebody who said you would not, or because you genuinely want to understand how this stuff works, that holds. It is still there at eleven o’clock on a Sunday when the assignment is not finished.

Determination, make no mistake about it. I have had plenty of those nights. The first 1,500 word assignment I had to write for my Adult Ed. degree, I spat the dummy and threw the papers across the room, because I could not get my head around it at all. Walked outside, took a breath, had a think, and realised the only thing between me and the end of it was ‘wanting it enough’. Given the right topic now I can knock out 30,000 words without blinking. That first 1,500 looked impossible.

Dream, desire, determination. Write yours down somewhere you will find it again in three months, and reflect on it as you progress through the journey.

You are going to feel dumb

This is the one people are least prepared for, and it is normal, and it is temporary, and almost nobody tells you either of those things.

There is a lot of talk about comfort zones and most of it is rubbish dressed up as a model. Here is the part that is real: you do not grow without being challenged, and being challenged feels bad while it is happening. You feel silly for not knowing. You get self doubt. You think you are the only one in the room not following it, and then you feel like a fraud for being there at all.

Normal, all of it. I have been there more than once. You are effectively starting an apprenticeship again, except this time as an adult who is already good at something, which somehow makes it worse. You do not build muscle without a bit of pain. This is the mental version and it is doing the same job. But there will be times it hurts, hurts your head and your ego.

Two things help. First, you are not the only one. I have been there at every step up I have made, and so has everybody in that room who is quiet about it. Second, if something is not working, change what you are doing and go again. Reading it four more times is not a strategy. Read it, highlight it, write it, say it aloud, record it and listen back, draw it, create numbered lists, make up stupid but memorable analogies, find a different book, ask somebody.

Ask the question in the room, too. You paid for the course. The person next to you has the same question and is hoping you will ask it.

Communication is most of the job

This is where tradespeople get caught out, because none of it was ever part of the trade. Three parts to it.

Computers

Less of an issue than it used to be, but it is still an issue for a fair few coming off the floor. My advice is blunt: get yourself on a short course and learn Word, Excel and email properly. Not well enough to survive, well enough to be competent.

Copy and paste. Bulleted lists. Formatting that holds all the way down a document. Tabs. Find and replace. Trivial to somebody who uses it daily, genuinely fiddly the first time. It is a bit like welding: at the start you are a baby giraffe, uncoordinated and nothing goes where you want it, and then one day it just goes. Put the hours in early, because slow typing taxes every assignment you ever hand in. Use voice to text, dictation programs and writing software to help with spelling and grammar.

In more modern times I would add: learn to use AI properly, not just as a chat bot but as a tool, a tool to help you learn, perform tasks and leverage its efficiencies. But do not let it do the work for you. You need to exercise your brain, that is how it extends. Use it to check, to explain something a different way, to argue with. Not to hand in.

Writing

Writing takes practice and there is no way around that. The spell check and the grammar check are the basics, not the job. What you want to develop is a feel for what good looks like.

Keep sentences manageable. Past about twenty five words it is usually two sentences, so break it up. Start using the terminology of welding management properly, because the words are the shortcut: once you have the right word you stop writing a paragraph to describe the thing.

And when you hit a word you do not know, look it up. Everybody around you is doing the same, just quietly. Extending your vocabulary is a learnt skill, same as any other, and it compounds. It takes a conscious decision and effort to do it. So decide.

Reports come later in the series: mind maps, brainstorming, how you actually build one. For now just know the first few are slow for everybody. It is a plan, then filling the gaps, researching what is missing, moving the pieces until it makes sense. Not one pass from top to bottom. Nobody does it that way.

And writing by hand

Separate skill, and people miss it. Most exams still have a written element, and that means sitting there for about three hours putting words on paper with a pen, and riding it out. If the last thing you handwrote at length was an apprenticeship logbook, your hand will give up long before your head does.

It is a physical skill like any other. The fingers, hand and the forearm have to be conditioned for it, and you cannot condition them the week before. Nobody thinks about this until they are an hour into a paper, cramping up, and starting to write shorter answers than they know, which is marks gone for a reason that has nothing to do with what you learnt.

So start now, alongside the typing. Read something, then put the pen down on paper: lists, the main points, how the bits connect. Two things happen. The hand gets used to the work, and the knowledge sticks better than it does when you only read it. Writing it out by hand makes you decide what matters, and deciding is where it goes in.

I will go through exam preparation properly later in the series. For right now, the instruction is simple: handwrite something every week, and find a few different comfortable pens.

Talking

Move into welding management and you are suddenly sitting between the floor and the office, often on the same day. Those are different audiences and they want different things. Say the same sentence to both and you will lose one of them.

Same facts, three deliveries. If you want new gear, the owner hears return and payback. The welders hear what it does to their day. Neither of them is being difficult, they are just measuring different things, and part of this job is knowing which ruler is in front of you.

This same concept will come up again when I get to examinations. You need to understand what the examiner is asking and the answer they need to hear. This is a learnt skill. No one really teaches it, and I have seen so many people fail exams for ‘not answering the question’.

Learning how to be marked again

As an apprentice, every player wins a prize. You cannot really fail if you turn up and try. That is how the VET sector is built, and I do not think it does anyone any favours, but it is the system you came through.

That stops here. At supervision level people read your exam papers and your assignments and they mark them, and the mark is a judgement on your work. I still remember my first assignment coming back. Red pen everywhere and a resubmit. Felt like a brick to the face. It was the kick in the ‘a#@’ I needed.

What I had to change was not how hard I was working, it was how I was answering. I was answering like a tradesperson: here is what I would do. The question wanted the requirement, where it comes from, why, and what you do about it on the floor. Different animal, and it has to be learnt.

It is worth flagging now, because it catches good people: your trade experience helps you in one paper and hurts you in another. Knowing how a job really runs is an advantage when a question asks you to apply something. It is a trap when the answer you give is what your workshop does rather than what the standard requires. Learn to notice which one is being asked for.

The exams are tough, and I will spend a fair bit of this series on how to approach them, because exam craft is learnable and it is worth real marks. The technique cuts the stress and gets you in the door with as much confidence as you can carry.

Is it worth it

It comes down to two questions, and only you can answer them. How much do you actually want it. And what are you willing to give up to get it, because without some sacrifice the odds are you will not get there. Time, money, a fair few weekends.

Absolutely worth it, in my view. I have always enjoyed learning, and being in a position to pass it on to somebody else is about as good as this trade gets.

None of what is in that middle column is beyond you. You already did a harder version of this once, as a first year, with less idea of what you were walking into.

Week 2. The three Ds, and learning how to learn again

Published 18 October 2026

Two things this week. The three Ds properly, because the drivers you start with are rarely the ones that finish it. Then an honest self test, which some of you should read before deciding not to do this at all. And then learning how to learn again, which for most people coming off the tools is the biggest gap in the whole crossing, and nobody teaches it.

Your drivers will change, and that is normal

Week 1 set the three Ds out: dream, desire, determination. Here is the part I left off. They do not sit still. The reason that gets you to enrol is almost never the reason that gets you to the end, and when the first one runs out people assume that is the answer. It is not. It just means it is time for the next one.

Mine moved around a fair bit. It started as wanting to know more, because I was sick of doing things a certain way just because that is how we had always done them. Then I watched people come through the workshop who I had grown to respect, and I wanted to be like them. For a while it was proving somebody wrong who had told me I would not make a good supervisor. Then it was correcting a misspent youth. These days it is mostly about passing it on, and calling BS, because injustice still gets under my skin. Same person, same journey, different reasons across nearly forty years. If you had asked me at the start which one would still be running now, I would have picked the wrong one.

So revisit them. Not constantly, but every few months, and honestly. Write the current one down. When you find it has changed, that is a good sign. It means the job has got closer and more real. The one to watch for is when you go looking and cannot find one at all. That is the point to stop and have a proper think, rather than grinding on and resenting it. Ask yourself what you want from this, and whether you are willing to do what it takes. Knowing why, and knowing what your drivers are, is what sparks the interest and keeps it alive, and curiosity comes out of that. Being genuinely interested and genuinely curious are the two traits that lighten the whole learning journey.

An honest self test

Nobody is watching. Answer these straight.

If those came back as yes, or an honest ‘I can work on that’, keep reading. If they did not, then do not do it, and understand that is a legitimate answer and not a failure. Far better to work that out now, on a Sunday, than in month five with the money spent and a couple of thousand hours of goodwill burnt at home. I am not discouraging you. From what I have seen, you have to want it, and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes.

Question four is the one to sit with. Wanting off the tools is a reason to change jobs. It is not a reason to take this one. The day you step up, the thing you get measured on stops being your own work and becomes everybody else’s, and if that does not appeal then no certificate is going to make it appeal. There is no shame in being a brilliant tradesperson who stays a brilliant tradesperson, or who goes into project management or drafting instead. The industry needs excellent welders a good deal more than it needs reluctant welding supervisors.

Learning how to learn again

This is the part people underestimate.

For most people coming off the tools it is the biggest step up they have made, and the biggest gap in their whole education. Not the content. The act of studying. The last time you sat down with a book and had to get something into your head on purpose was probably school, or first year trade school, and for a fair few of us that was twenty or thirty years ago and it did not go brilliantly at the time either.

You are not a pioneer here, and that is worth saying plainly, because I had to go through the same confronting trip myself. Thousands have made this exact crossing, and every one of them sat where you are sitting now and thought their head did not work the way a classroom wanted it to. This is the first big step of crossing the chasm. It is often the hardest and the most daunting.

Here is what I want you to take from this. You have been learning continuously, the whole time. You just learnt by doing. Watch somebody, have a go, get corrected, have another go, and one day it goes. That is learning, and you are good at it. The problem is that the classroom version does not work that way by default. Somebody hands you a book and you read it, and reading is the one mode that never worked for you. It certainly does not for me. Reading is not studying. Reading is the first ten minutes of studying.

So you rebuild it into something closer to how you already learn. Read the drawing, get the parts out on the bench, lay them out in an order that makes sense, put it together, get it wrong, go again. That is a learning loop, and you have been running one for years.

The loop that has always worked for me

This is mine. It is not the only one and I am not telling you it is. It is what I have used since I was studying in my bedroom as a kid, and what I have built on and put in front of students for years.

1. Read it, and highlight as you go. Highlighting on its own does nothing at all. It is a marker for the next pass, nothing more.
2. Go back and read it again, the highlights this time.
3. Brainstorm. Write the key points onto a notepad, by hand, without worrying about the order. Just get the content down. Lay the pieces of the puzzle out so you can see them.
4. Mind map it. Draw it. This is where you organise the information so it makes sense to you. The mind map is where you create the filing system. It is like organising the storeroom at work: everything goes in its place. So sketch it, draw the flow, group it in numbers. Put the puzzle together.
5. Type them up, if that suits you. You get another pass at the material and a tidy copy you can search. The key is writing them, in my opinion.
6. Read your mind maps aloud and record it on your phone. A couple of minutes of work.
7. Listen back. Driving to work, walking, before you go to sleep. Dead time you were never using.
8. Make up analogies, and the stupider the better. Examples to come.
9. Produce it on demand. Draw your mind map, say it out loud or in your head, without reading your notes.
10. Reinforce through repetition.

Three main contributing factors. Four reasons each. Five elements in that one. The number is part of the hook. Think of the rack in the store with three spaces for the 5 inch grinders: if a space is empty, you know something is missing. Make the map as big or as small as the topic needs. Know that it will be hard to start with and that you will do it more than once for each topic. I will share more welding mind maps later in the series, but you have to develop your own, or you never build the filing system and you never get the ability to retrieve from it.

Every one of those steps puts the same information in through a different door. Read it and you have used one sense. Write it, say it, hear it, draw it, and you have used four. Each pass forces you to decide what actually matters, which is how it gets categorised and put away in your own store, and that is where the learning really happens.

People will tell you that you are a visual learner, or that you learn by listening. I do not buy that as a reason to do only one of them. Do the lot. Very few people, if any, learn by reading the same thing over and over. What you will find after a few weeks is that two or three of them work best for you, and that is the mix you keep. Mine is write it, say it, hear it back. Yours might be draw it and teach it to somebody. You find that out by trying all of them, not by taking a quiz about yourself.

Then, if you can, find something at work to apply the new learning to, link it to, or recognise it in. That turns it into an experience.

One more thing. The first time you run this process, particularly from the mind map through to trying to recall it, you will more than likely feel dumb, inadequate and out of your depth. I know I did. That is what it feels like outside your comfort zone, and it is part of the process. Like learning to weld. Your first weld was crap. There is no reason to expect your first run at this to be any different.

Group it in numbers. You are building a filing system.

This is the step that turns reading into recall, and it is the one I would keep if I had to throw the rest away.

If you hold a topic in your head as one lump of information, you will not get it back out under pressure. Remembering something at random is genuinely hard. Being prompted is easy, and everybody can do it. So build yourself the prompts.

Take preheat. Why do we preheat? Three reasons. Not five, and not a range of metallurgical considerations. Three.

1. Slow the cooling rate through roughly 800 to 500 degrees C, so the microstructure does not come out hard and brittle.
2. Hold it warm for longer above about 200 degrees C, so hydrogen has time to diffuse out before it can do any damage.
3. Reduce the difference in expansion and contraction across the joint, which is what drives distortion and locks in residual stress.

Now I am carrying three pegs: 800 to 500, 200, distortion. That is all I have to hold in my head. In an exam, or standing in front of a client who has asked a fair question, I am not recalling an essay. I am recalling three pegs, and each one drags its own paragraph out behind it. Hang another item on the hydrogen peg, low hydrogen consumables, oven control, moisture, and it comes up with the peg rather than needing to be remembered on its own.

You are building clusters of information, like a jigsaw. Nail one cluster and in time the clusters join up, so preheat links to hydrogen assisted cold cracking, which links to carbon equivalent, and on it goes. But nail each cluster first.

Preheat goes in the middle of the page. Then the question you will actually be asked: why do we do it?

Figure 4. Preheat, one page, three pegs.

Draw this one by hand, on one page. The drawing is the study. The page is only what you have left over afterwards.

Do that for every topic and you end up with a filing system rather than a pile. Hear the word preheat and three drawers open. That is the whole trick, and it is the difference between knowing something and being able to produce it. These are prompts, and you build out from them.

Stupid or funny analogies beat clever ones

Once something is in, you need a way to keep it there and get it out again. That is what analogies are for. They do not have to be clever. They have to be memorable to you.

Take the word paradigm. When somebody explained it to me the first time, I could never spell it. They said Para dig M. Three pieces, said once, and the spelling and the meaning have never left me. It is not clever and it does not need to be. And yes, now is the time you go and look up what paradigm means, and extend your vocabulary while you are there. The sillier the saying, the better it holds, because your head hangs on to odd things and throws sensible ones away. That is how you extend what you have got: you tie the new thing to something your brain has already decided is worth keeping.

If you can explain a concept with an analogy, you understand it. If you cannot, you have memorised some words and you will lose them. I have built a fair collection of these over the years, some for my own exams and a lot more for students, and I will go through the good ones properly later in the series, because that is a whole instalment on its own.

Then say it back

Getting it in is not the finish. Being able to produce it on demand is the goal, and that is a separate skill that has to be practised on its own.

Get into the habit of regurgitating. In the car, pick a topic and talk it through out loud. Preheat. Go. Three reasons, then expand each one. If you dry up halfway through the second, you have just found tonight’s study, and it took you ninety seconds to find it. Same on paper: blank page, notes shut, write down what you know, then open the notes and check. The gap between what you thought you knew and what actually came out is the only honest measure of where you are.

Reading your notes over again feels productive and tells you nothing. Writing them out from memory feels terrible and tells you everything.

Week 2 is craft, not study evidence. Nothing here quotes a standard or a clause. Where I say something works, I mean it has worked repeatedly for me and for the people I have taught, not that there is a controlled trial behind it.

Week 3. Communication is a learnt skill, not a personality

Published 25 October 2026

You already communicate all day. What changes when you step up is who you are talking to, and what each of them is measuring. This week: why communication is now the measure of your work, the audiences you stand between, why writing is the one you have to practise on purpose, and why the conversation, the email and the report all have to say the same thing. None of it is talent.

The why, and the levels

I have always needed to know why I am being told something. If I can see why it matters, it sticks. If I can’t, it goes straight through.

Back at school somebody tried to take me through advanced maths. Numbers on a board, no context, and I was told I needed to know it. Nobody mentioned that 3, 4, 5 squares up the wall of a shed. Had they done that, I would have had somewhere to hang my interest and I would have listened. That is how most people off the tools learn. So I will start with the why.

Think of it as going from primary school to high school, and then high school to university. Every step up, the game changes and you have to change with it. Same thing happens to your communication when you shift off the shop floor into welding management, or into being the key welding person in the business.

Your job is no longer to weld or to fabricate. Your job is to move the requirement between the office and the floor, and between the business and the client. Which means every piece of communication you put out, spoken or written, is now a measure of your work. The weld used to be the measure of where you were up to. Now it is the email, the report, the procedure and the conversation. Let that sink in. It is not there to terrify you, it is there to show you the level up you have to make.

Getting the message to the right audience, clear enough that you can go back and verify it has actually been done, is how work gets done with the fewest errors in it. That is the job description.

So what are the methods? A text message. Walking up to somebody and asking them to sort something out. An email. A request for test. An ITP. A welding procedure. Every one of those is communication and every one of them has your name on it.

Here is the mindset I try to get into students. Once that piece of communication is out there, it lives forever, exactly like your weld does. So without spending all day on it, polish it before you send it.

It matters in the exam room too. You can have the information in your head and still get nothing for it, because you could not get it onto the paper in a form the examiner could mark. Retention is half of it. Conveying it is the other half, and that half takes time to build. Start now and it is there when you need it.

Nobody is naturally good at this

Three things before we go any further.

• I am not telling you the way I communicate is perfect, or that it is the only way to do it. I am putting it out there for tradies to learn from and develop their own way.
• It is a skill you practise, same as welding. The more you do it the better you get, but only if you are getting feedback on it, or watching how other people do it.
• One of my mentors told me the technical stuff is the easy part. Dealing with people is the hard part, and nobody teaches you that when you learn welding supervision. He was spot on.

There is a belief on every shop floor that some people are just good communicators and the rest are not. Rubbish. The ones who are good at it have had more practice and more honest feedback, usually because somebody made them do it early. That is the whole difference.

And being a good talker is not the same thing as being a good communicator. We all have a mate who can talk under water with a mouth full of marbles. It does not mean a clear message ever comes out the other end.

The trade taught you to do. It did not teach you to explain. Twenty years of knowing exactly why a joint cracked is worth nothing to the person who has to sign the cheque if you cannot get it out of your head and into a form that person can act on. That is not a knowledge problem and it is not an intelligence problem. It is just a skill you have not practised yet.

Here is the bit people do not appreciate. Talking gets practised by accident. You do it every day, you get instant feedback off the face in front of you, and you adjust without noticing. Writing gets no such help. Nobody pulls a face while you type. They might well pull one when they read it, you just never see it. So writing only ever improves on purpose, and that means sitting down and doing it badly for a while. Same as your first weld, and that is fine. We all started there.

So expect to write poorly at first. Your first reports will read like somebody else wrote them, somebody who does not sound like you and is trying too hard. Everybody’s do. It is the same place you were in the first week of your apprenticeship, standing there with a torch in your hand making a mess of a fillet you can now run in your sleep. The feeling is identical and so is the fix.

Everybody is tuned to a different station

Week 1 said you have to know which ruler is in front of you. This is the technique that goes with it.

Every audience has its own discourse. The way they speak, the vocabulary they use, what they are actually listening for. People get interested at the exact moment what you are saying touches the thing they are measured on. Not before. You can be completely right, with the standard open in front of you, and get nowhere, because you are answering a question the person was never asking. They are not being difficult. They are tuned to a different station and you are broadcasting on yours.

So before you open your mouth, and before you start typing, answer one question: what does this person get judged on at the end of the month? Then open on that.

• The owner or director is judged on money, risk and whether the job ships. Lead with cost, saving, payback or exposure.
• The client, engineer or inspector is judged on whether what gets built matches what was specified. Lead with the requirement, the control and the evidence.
• The welders are judged on getting through the work without it coming back. Lead with what changes for their hands and why it makes the job easier, safer or faster.
• The supplier is judged on filling the order. Lead with exactly what you want, to what standard, and when.

None of that is politics and none of it is sales. We are not manipulating anybody. The facts do not change, the message still has to land and you still have to get the outcome. All that changes is the order you put it in, so the person can receive it and act on it.

Where English is a second language there is another layer on top of all of it. Slang does not travel, so leave it out. Slow your speech down and give the words somewhere to land. Then ask for the understanding back in their words rather than asking if they have got it and taking the nod, because the nod is not an answer.

Same job, three versions

Twenty five millimetre plate, 350 grade, and nobody on the floor is preheating. You have worked out it needs to be. Here is the same fact, three times.

One fact. Three openings, because three people are holding three different rulers. Notice that nothing was softened or spun for anybody, and notice that the welders got the practical benefit and an offer of help, because that is their currency.

Suppliers are an audience too, and the one most people underestimate

A supplier cannot read your mind and has no reason to guess in your favour. Every ambiguity in an order gets resolved by somebody in a warehouse who is not thinking about your data book. Then it turns up, and it is your problem.

Six things on every order and you will stop having this problem: what it is, how much of it, to what standard or classification, what paperwork comes with it, the date, and what happens to the job if the date is missed. Say the last one out loud. A supplier who knows a line is holding a weld will move it up the pile. A supplier reading “ASAP” will not.

And remember what a purchase order actually is. It is a written communication that ends up in the MDR with your name on it. If it does not say what you needed, the hole is yours.

Most of us have learnt those holes the hard way, with the wrong thing rocking up on the back of a truck. You get on the phone to the supplier and the answer is “you didn’t say that”. Annoying, and usually right.

So build yourself a template. Get the requirements onto the PO itself, or onto a cheat sheet you copy and paste from, and add a line to it every time something turns up wrong. In a year you will have a sheet that is worth real money and it cost you nothing to build.

The communication triangle

Three corners, and most of the trouble happens because people treat them as three separate jobs.

Whatever you say, write it the same way. That is the whole section. The three corners have to carry the same message in the same context. Not the same words, you have just seen why the words change by audience, but the same facts, the same position and the same level of concern.

The failure looks like this. You tell the welders it is fine for now and you will sort it out. You email the client that it is under control. Then six weeks later the report says the joints were non conforming. Three versions of the truth, all of them with your name on, and you get to explain which one you actually meant. Nobody plays back the conversation. They read the email and they read the report.

There are plenty of examples from my own career. Four worth passing on.

• Do not be the smiling assassin. That is where you duck the hard conversation on the floor, soften it until it sounds like nothing much, everybody smiles, and then you send an email or a report that says something different. Whatever is going in the report gets said to their face first.
• Follow the chain. Welding supervisor, you can go and talk to the welders. Welding inspector, that information goes to the welding supervisor, not around the side of them.
• Follow a verbal up in writing. “Further to our conversation” costs you four lines and turns a he said, she said into a record. Be mindful how you word it, because the same four lines read as either clarity or a trap depending on how they are written.
• Do not let your ego get in the way of a good decision. If you did not explain it properly, or you went back and read the spec and you had it wrong, own it. “I have checked the spec, it says this, I know that is different to what I said in the workshop, let us work out where we go from here.” Nobody has ever lost respect for that. Plenty have lost it for the opposite.

The day to day written stuff, and how it goes wrong

Email and Teams are now a bigger part of your job than the stinger ever was. A few things that take ten minutes to learn and save you years.

• Tone does not survive the trip, so be mindful of it. On the floor you have volume, a face and a shrug carrying your meaning. In writing you have none of that. Dry humour reads as a smart a#$e in somebody’s inbox at seven in the morning, and a short reply sent in a hurry reads as a brush off. Take the tone out and let the facts do it.
• One topic per email. Two topics means one of them gets answered and the other one disappears.
• The subject line is the decision, not the job. “Update” is not a subject. “Preheat on the 25 mm joints, need a call by Thursday” is.
• The ask goes in the first two lines, with everything else underneath it for the people who want the detail. Most will not read past line three, and that is fine if line three is where the ask is.
• Numbers, not descriptions. Joint numbers, drawing numbers, weld numbers, dates, dimensions. “That joint on the skid” is a conversation, not a record.
• Structure is everything. A rambling 350 word block of text has no clarity in it, and you have no way of knowing whether the point landed. You will have noticed I like lists and bullet points. They break it into chunks somebody can actually hold. Same when you are answering an email with five questions in it: say your responses are in blue below, and answer each one where it sits.
• Never send it angry. Write the whole thing, save it, go home. In the morning you will change three words and they will be the three that would have cost you the relationship. Guilty as charged here, more than once.
• Confirm verbal instructions the same day. Four lines: here is what I understood, here is what we agreed, tell me if that is wrong. Do it because it stops a genuine misunderstanding, not because you are building a case. It just happens to do both.

Reports, and the three questions

Week 1 promised reports would come up properly. Here is the start of it.

A report is not a long email. It is the written version of a decision somebody else has to make, written for a reader who was not there and cannot ask you a follow up question. That sentence is your guide on how to build one.

There is no single report format. A visual inspection report, a request for capital expenditure on new gear, and an expert witness report with fifty million dollars of claim hanging off it are three different animals. The format follows the intent.

What the good ones have in common:

• Who it is written for, and who wrote it.
• The intent or the scope. What is in it, and just as important, what is not.
• The data. The observations, the detail.
• The conclusion, the outcome, the recommendations.
• Where the information came from. Cite it where it matters, and that can be as simple as the drawing number or the spec.

Simply put, three questions have to be answered. What happened. So what. What now. If a paragraph does not serve one of those three, cut it, however good it is. Most first drafts are forty percent material the writer found interesting and the reader does not need.

And yes, a brainstorm and a mind map is where I start when I am building one. Same loop as Week 2, pointed at a different job.

A supervisor level report, at minimum:

• What the job is, and what you were actually asked to look at.
• What you found, with numbers. Not “excessive porosity”, but how much, where, over what length, found how.
• What it means against the requirement, and name the requirement.
• What you recommend, with the cost of doing it and the consequence of doing nothing.
• Who does what, by when.
• Where it gets recorded.

That last point is the line almost everybody leaves off, and it is the one that separates a supervisor’s report from a welder’s opinion. Finding the problem is half the job. The cause, the corrective and preventive action, and where the record lands, is the other half.

Now the context rule, because it is the same idea as the three versions above. A report written for the owner that reads like a weld procedure will not get read. A report written for the client that reads like a toolbox talk will not get believed. Decide who has to act on it before you write a single word, and write the whole thing for that person, in their discourse. If two people have to act, that is two documents, or two separate calls to action inside one: Bob the engineer, I need this from you. Sheryl at the client, I need that. The other way is one document with a half page summary at the front, written for the one who will not read the rest.

How one actually gets built

Not from the top down. Nobody writes a report in one pass from the first line to the last, and believing that is what everybody else does is why people sit staring at a blank page feeling thick.

Headings first. Dot points under each heading, in any order, as fast as you can get them down. Then you can see the holes, and the holes tell you what to go and find out. Research the gaps, move the pieces around, and only then turn the dot points into sentences. The writing is the last twenty percent of the work, not the first.

Your first few will take three times as long as you think they should. That is not a sign you are no good at this. It is the same as the first few root runs you had to grind out. Mind maps and brainstorming are what work for me. Develop the skill, because that is how you get your thoughts organised and the page filled before you start writing.

Building your own style

You are not trying to sound like an engineer. You are trying to be understood the first time, by somebody who is busy. That is the target. Eight things that get you there.

• Steal structures, not words. Keep a folder of reports, emails and letters that landed well, including ones written to you. When you are stuck, open the folder and copy the shape.
• Write something every day. A hundred words on what happened on the job. It does not have to go anywhere. Doing the reps is the point, same as anything else you have ever got good at.
• Twenty five words. Week 1 said it, so here it is again. Past about twenty five words it is two sentences. Break it up, and one idea per paragraph.
• Short words. If a short word does the job, the long one is showing off, and it reads exactly like that. Use, not utilise.
• Dictate, then edit. Talking is your strong channel, so use it to get the first draft out. Talk it into your phone, let it transcribe, then fix it. The fixing is the writing. A good voice to text app will save you hundreds of hours.
• Read it out loud before you send it. Every sentence you stumble over is a sentence the reader will stumble over. Ninety seconds, and it catches most of it.
• Use the tech. Grammarly, the spell and grammar check, even AI to tighten up the structure. Read what it suggests and learn from it rather than just taking it, because the learning is the bit you keep.
• Get it marked. Find one person who will be honest and ask the right question: not is this any good, but which bits did you have to read twice. That answer is a list of exactly what to fix, and it is worth more than any course.

Do that for six months and you will have a style. It will be yours, it will sound like you, and it will be plainer than you expect. Plain is the goal. Nobody ever complained that a report was too easy to follow.

The welding you can already do. This part you learn the same way you learnt the welding: badly at first, then on purpose, then without thinking about it. You just have to want to.

Week 3 is craft, not study evidence. Forty odd years in welding and fabrication, the path I walked and the mistakes I made on the way through, my own trip through the qualifications, and a lot of students taken through the same crossing. Where I say something works, I mean it has worked repeatedly for me and for the people I have taught, not that there is a controlled trial behind it. Trial it yourself and keep what works for you.