Do you enjoy new and exciting challenges? What about being paid to travel?

Is it impossible to imagine yourself sitting behind a desk, day in and day out? Does
the thought of a typical nine to five job scare you? Are you a perfectionist who likes
to see the job get done right the first time? Do you like using creativity to get work
done? Do you want to work in a field that is as diverse and as intricate as you are?
Do you look for plenty of opportunity in a possible career? If you answered yes to
these questions you may want to think about a career in the field of welding.
The welding industry is huge and covers many diverse areas. It touches
many aspects of your day to day life, most of the time without you even realizing
its there. As you read this, I hope to persuade you in the right direction toward a
career in welding. If you have already decided to give it a try, I hope to give you
more insight on the world of welding with plenty of facts and share with your
thoughts and experiences of Steve Ford. Steve has been in the welding industry
longer than you have been alive.
Welding has been around since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Even before then blacksmiths were dabbling in the science of welding by combining
metals to make them stronger or to hold them together better. Today welding is still
a growing industry with new large scale sky scrapers being built every day. We are
also seeing new advances in alloy metals that are being used to make cars safer
and lighter. Most people might think that welding just grabbing a MIG gun pulling
the trigger and magically they are welding. Everyone can weld but not everyone
can be a welder. It takes patience, a good eye for detail, a steady hand, and
practice. A lot of practice! Its a challenging but rewarding industry with
opportunity at every corner. It is one of the most diverse fields in the world today
with job opportunities all over the planet.

Just how diverse is it you may ask? Lets ponder this for a minute. Starting
off, any product that has metal as a component will have welding involved in one
way or another. In structural construction there are tons of ways welding is
integrated into the building process. Skyscrapers, or any building for that matter,
are being built primarily out of steel beams, studs, and joists, all of which need to be
welded together. Concrete structures even require welding. The steel rebar that
lies within the concrete gives it extra strength and gives it its shape. This all needs
to be welded together to create a skeleton to build on. Even in your home that may
be made of mostly wood requires the use of tools to cut and shape, require welding.
To take it a step even further, the machines that make the parts for the tools, how
are those put together? With welding of course. How do you imagine the frame of
your car is held together? It is secured together by using welding. Some people
may think that welding robots in the car industry are taking over, but who do you
think programs the robots to weld? Welders do because they know how to weld and
how the job is supposed to be done. Then lets think who assembles the custom
robots that weld the cars together, welders do. The list goes on and on in almost
every industry imaginable. As you can see welding is a career that can never go
away. Its just as diverse as you can imagine it to be. It covers everything from
assembling massive dams and bridges to the cellphone sitting in your pocket. Not
only are there many different types of places you find welding, there is also many
different forms of welding.
There are 5 main types of welding you will encounter in the field. They are
GMAW, GTAW, SMAW, Oxy Acetylene, and FCAW. While there is over 25 different
types of welding these are the 5 you will run into the most. GMAW stands for Gas
Metal Arc Welding it is also known as MIG welding. This form of welding is the

easiest to learn and master. All that is required is to point the MIG gun at some
metal, pull the trigger and the machine handles the rest. All you have to do is show
the puddle of molten metal where to go by moving the gun across the joint to be
welded. This form is the most common and widely used in industry. The next is
GTAW which stands for Gas Tungsten Arc Welding or otherwise known as TIG
welding. This is the most technical of the welding industry and it requires a welder
with a lot of skill to run this process. This is due to the fact that there are so many
variables in this process. Its hard to learn and hard to master, you need to have
extremely steady hands and a good eye to keep the puddle consistent and uniform.
They use TIG whenever the weld needs to be free from imperfections or if you are
welding on exotic metals. SMAW stands for Shielded Metal Arc welding this is
commonly referred to as Stick welding. This process is typically used for thicker
metal and in outdoor welding due to the fact that it has no shielding gas that can be
blown away in the wind. All of the other processes use a shielding gas to keep the
puddle free from oxidation. Stick welding uses a substance known as flux to keep
the puddle shielded from oxidation. Oxy Acetylene welding can also be called Oxyfuel welding. This form of welding is dying off as it does not create very strong
welds, however it is the number one way to braze materials together. With Brazing
you can combine unlike metals and non-weldable metals together with a strong
bond. It is very useful when dealing with cast iron, brass, copper and thin gage
metals. FCAW stands for Flux Cored Arc Welding it is essentially combining the MIG
process with the Stick process. They have a dual shield and an inner shield version
of this process. A special wire with a flux coating on the inside of it is ran through a
MIG gun the flux protects the weld in inner shield. In dual shield the same wire is
used along with a shielding gas to produce extremely smooth welds. Between the

many different processes and the amount of diversity in the welding industry this
creates endless opportunity in the field.
I had the opportunity to speak with Steve Ford who is currently a professor at
Salt Lake Community College teaching welding and has worked in the welding
industry for over 40 years. During my interview I asked How many opportunities
do you feel are in the welding industry? this was his reply:
I feel like right now there is a lot of opportunity. The biggest why is because
a lot of the baby boomers are getting ready to retire, its leaving a big void
there. There are two things happening, one thing there was a long period
where we didnt really train welders, the pay wasnt there, the interest wasnt
there, and we just werent training people. Now we have a combined effect,
we have a situation where the baby boomers are getting ready to retire,
previously we werent training people [] All the sudden something changed,
the pay jumped up and all the sudden there was an incentive and all this
interest in it. But, what had to happen they had to have a shortage for that
to take place [] and now because of the deficiency of the baby boomers
getting out of it and the fact that they are in high demand they are just got to
keep raising the pay too keep people interested to do the work. So thats
where its at right now.
Even in Steves eyes he sees the amount of opportunity that welding has to offer.
After the interview when I was chatting with Steve he was explaining to me what
areas of the industry are growing in the world today are Nuclear welding, and
underwater welding. I plan on going into underwater welding as a career so I was
quite intrigued by this.

Underwater Welding has been around once again since the start of the
industrial revolution. However, it is a very small field full of a few handfuls of elite
welders. It is a very hard industry to break into Steve explained to me. If you
manage to get into this field the pay alone makes up for all of it. (Ford) The
average salary for new underwater welders ranges anywhere from $90,000$150,000 and if you stay in the field for long enough you have the potential to make
upwards of 300,000 a year. While thats a nice pay check its not only about the
money. Another benefit is they pay you to travel the world and to dive in all sorts of
unique locations. The experience you gain from this field also can support you for
the rest of your welding career due to the fact that it is a highly advanced field.
However, this job also happens to be one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.
Within this field there are separate areas that you can fall into for different types of
jobs. The areas are Saturation, Offshore, Inland, Hazmat, and Salvation each
category has its benefits and drawbacks also their own set of dangers. In
Saturation Diving you are loaded into a pressurization capsule where they slowly get
your body used to the type of pressure that you experience at the bottom of the
ocean. Then they lower the capsule to the bottom of the ocean where they have a
living quarters set up and then you spend the next couple of days living at the
bottom of the ocean while you work on the bases of oil rig pylons where they plunge
into the earth. This area is considered to be one of the most dangerous areas due
to the fact that pressurizing and depressurizing can have a huge effect on your body
and decompression illnesses car result. The next area is Offshore; these guys deal
mainly with projects on the surface down to about 165 feet deep. These projects
include fixing the hulls of ships, repairing the props of ships, working on piping
running through the water. They also get to do demolition jobs where they have

controlled sinking of old ships and oil platforms Etc. Their dangers include
electrocution, being crushed, getting trapped and a few others. Inland diving is one
of the more diverse areas. If you are in inland commercial diver you could be
working on anything from dams and bridges to crawling into a two-foot-wide pipe
and going down to try and weld a crack in the pipe. Hazmat diving is another very
dangerous area because you are diving into a place that is immediately dangerous
to your life. They wear special suits to keep contamination out and to keep you
safe. They dive in oil spills, contaminated water, sewage facilities, and the best one
of all nuclear reactor cooling pools. Whenever they dive they have a crew with
them to decontaminate them as soon as they reach the surface. In salvation diving
they have a pretty cool job because they get to go explore sunken ships and
aircraft. Whenever a ship sinks the primary job is to recover items that are still of
value from the ship. Sometimes when the ship sinks it is environmentally damaging
so they gather a large crew of divers and boats and they actually raise the ship and
get it floating again. In a way its the ultimate treasure hunting job. To many
people any of these jobs sound absolutely dangerous. But, if you are like me and
you like the adrenaline of it all and you want to find a career that expresses your
adventurous side, underwater welding might just be the right job for you.
If you happen to be less adventurous you can still make a lot of money doing
general welding. The average salary of a general welder today is around $39,300.
But that is just basic welding another popular field that you have the option to go
into in being a pipe fitter their salary starts at around $59,000 a year and can range
all the way up to $100,000+ with experience. Another field is becoming a
boilermaker they make large and small chambers that are required to withstand a
lot of pressure, you need to be extremely precise when you are in this field but it

can defiantly pay off. The salary for this job starts at around 65,000 dollars a year
and with experience can easily reach 120,000 dollars a year. It is also possible to
get into the field of exotic metal welding where you can be only working with high
end metal and rare metals. Doing this it is possible to make upwards of 200,000 a
year but this area is even harder to get into than underwater welding.
I hope that after reading this you now have a better idea on whether you
would want to become a welder or if it is not the right job for you. It can be a tough
field as the conditions are not always ideal.