Skilled Trades

Fun Facts About Welding

Skilled TradesNovember 19, 2015

A welding career has much more variety than commonly known. As a matter of fact, they have one of the most diverse career paths of any skilled trade profession! If you’re considering joining the welding profession, check out these fun facts about the trade from CareersInWelding.com to give you an idea about the diversity of the field. Interesting areas of welding work include:

  • NASCAR Preparation. Did you know that before the rubber meets every NASCAR track, nearly a thousand man-hours will be spent welding and fabricating each race car? Prior to every NASCAR race hundreds of parts are hand-cut, welded and machined to get each car ready to go.
  • Explosion Welding. Explosion welding is a powerful tool that does what many other welding processes can’t – join virtually every type of metal. Even if those metals are completely different, explosion welding is powerful enough to fuse them together.
  • Everyday Product Welding. Over half of all products made in the U.S. have needed the skills of a welder to create. That includes race cars, bridges, ships, computers, medical devices, oil rigs, farm equipment, cell phones, scooters, and even MP3 players!

Where Can Your Welding Career Take You?

Welding certification opens up a diverse career path. Better still, a Bloomberg article reported the American Welding Society estimates there will be a shortage of 290,000 welding professionals across the country within five years. The report says the number of U.S. welders dropped from 570,000 in 1988 to fewer than 360,000 by 2012 due to contractions within the manufacturing sector. That’s changed over the past few years. Since the end of the recession in 2009, manufacturing has grown faster than the rest of the economy and, from 2010 through 2014, more new jobs were added in the sector every year – the first time that’s happened since the early 1960s. “We’re scrambling to catch up,” Manufacturing Institute Vice President Gardner Carrick told Bloomberg. And, with many current welders nearing retirement and the profession now demanding advanced skills that many U.S. welders lack, schools such as Fortis are preparing students to become America’s next generation of welding professionals. Fortis offers welding programs at campuses in Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that provide the education and training needed for entry into the field as industrial welders, welding apprentices, or as check welders. Learn more about Fortis’s welding programs.

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