What they don’t teach you in welding school
I attended the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology from 2020 to 2021. It’s one of the top welding schools in the country and there I was taught how to mig, tig, and stick weld.
At Hobart, we went very in-depth on welding processes and how to produce a quality and structurally sound weld. This essentially includes how to prevent porosity, lack of fusion, underfill, and other factors that can affect a weld’s strength and quality.
One of the things I learned pretty quickly was that I wasn’t experienced with welding in uncontrolled conditions. Out in the real world, that’s a majority of what we experience and have to work on. Welding school didn’t cover a lot of the fabrication side of things; how to work with rusty or bad metal, on unclean or rough surfaces, and how to work in less than ideal conditions.
For example, I welded on an auger at a construction site and there was nothing clean about it. The material was rugged and the fit-up wasn’t the best either. I had to grind the material to make a cleaner surface for the weld and there were areas that were challenging to weld because of the way the tooling was worn. When I was in school, all the material was clean and had an even cut so I didn’t have trouble fitting my pipe/plates. This is where I learned the fundamentals, and since then I have been learning much more.
It was great to learn how to weld, but we didn’t learn about a lot of the curveballs the conditions can throw at us. I left school unfamiliar with a lot of the logistics on the before and after of the welding processes. A lot of this isn’t Hobart’s fault, a lot of things are hard to teach in a classroom setting and are better learned through personal experience. Hobart mainly taught me how to weld in a straight forward environment so I could master the foundation. Setting up my machine and fine-tuning it was something I didn’t have to do much of, their machines were always ready to go.
One thing I wish I would’ve learned was how to set up a machine from square one. There are many settings and controls on a welder depending on the size and brand of it which can make it harder to teach in a classroom setting because the settings often come down to personal preference as well. Jobs and workplaces will likely all have different machines that they use, so it would have been good to learn the setup basics while in school to help us get more familiar and adjust easier to all types of machines.
Hobart and many other trade schools do a lot to make sure that their students are set up for success after graduation and I am appreciative of my time there. There’s a lot left to learn when you begin your career as a welder, and I hope these thoughts help prepare others to enter the trade as a new welder.
