Welding Certification

I certified my first weldor of the school year the other day. Plate certifications are not all that difficult if you are willing to spend some time in the welding booth doing repetitious work for days on end. Many of my vocational students aren't willing to do that even though they have the opportunity to become AWS certified in all position welding at little or no cost to them. Every year I get a few willing to make the effort, and it can really open some doors. You'll notice two sets of coupons in the photos. If you take a guided bend test and don't pass it on the first try, you have to pass two good ones in a row and that's what happened here. Nothing wrong with some additional practice, however. The kid stuck with it and because these were welded in the vertical position, he's certified on plate in flat, horizontal and vertical positions. To be certified overhead requires another test.

At the beginning of the school year, I was telling my vocational students that there would be all kinds of good welding jobs available in the next few years but now it looks like it might be the soup line for a lot of people. Many construction projects are coming to a halt, people every where are being laid off and it doesn't look real sunny for my soon to be graduates. So, if you have a bunch of high schoolers who have a hard time visualizing what they're going to be doing in the next few years, what impact is the economic downturn going to have on them now? Are they even aware that it might be tough out there for them? Will it mean they will actually come to school every day trying to learn as much as possible so they can have a leg up on the other guy? Do they realize that job skills learned now for free are going to be in demand in the future but will be costly to learn in the future? Is youthful bliss going to allow them to muddle through?

Even though the world seems to get crazier every day, I'm still blessed with some good people who want to be craftsmen. When all of this Fanny and Freddie and Big Three stuff settles down, it will be manufacturing and the trades that ultimately will have to do the heavy lifting. If you don't have Atlas to support the world, you need people making things to generate real wealth. As soon as we get the money changers out of the temple and get back to honest labor in the factories and small farms, things will be a lot better for my graduates and the rest of us.