Michigan school builds foundation for welding success

Jason North illustrates many welding concepts, not in the classroom, but in the Merrill Institute lab. Images provided by MERRILL Technologies Group Inc.

The Merrill Institute, a welding school launched and owned by MERRILL Technologies Group Inc., a contract metal manufacturer in Alma, Mich., has proved remarkably effective. Since its launch in 2011, almost 350 welders have graduated from its 12-week program, and all but a few of them have found work in the welding profession. Thirty-eight now work for the school’s parent company, and the rest have landed jobs at other manufacturers in Michigan and elsewhere.

What’s the secret to the school’s success? “We model everything we do on how the workday will actually be on the job.”

So said Jason North, manager, operations and industrial training, who helped found the institute in 2011. How do instructors model the workday, exactly? North said it has to do with the program’s hands-on focus. Sure, the institute incorporates some classroom time, but only when it’s impossible or impractical to show the concepts in the welding lab.

North emphasized that the school complements, but doesn’t replace, on-the-job weld training. After all, instructors can cover only so much in 12 weeks. The school graduates extremely capable yet still entry-level welders. But with the right in-house training and support, they won’t stay entry-level welders for long.

More Than a Worker Shortage

Like many manufacturers, MERRILL had trouble finding qualified welders, especially starting in the early 2000s. But the problem ran deeper than a mere worker shortage. North recalled attending meetings with other manufacturers in the region. They found that even the welding applicants with some experience, perhaps even with an associate degree, couldn’t weld proficiently. They could identify the components of stress-strain curves and carbon equivalency charts, which was great, but they didn’t have the dexterity to wield a welding gun through even some basic test positions.

Thing is, North himself never attended community college. Like many career welders today, North learned on the job. He began working in sheet metal at 19, first as a general laborer, then getting his feet wet with some spot welding and a little gas metal arc welding (GMAW).

He then landed at Morbark Industries, a large forestry and recycling equipment manufacturer in the area. North was hired to take over for a retiring welder in a small-parts welding cell. “I was very fortunate. I worked with him for about six months, and he was an extremely patient individual.”

North had a similar experience when he found a job at nearby Burch Tank & Truck. “The owner was very patient with me, and I learned a lot on the job. And you know what? He said the same thing back in that time frame [in the early 1990s]. They had a hard time finding skilled people.”

Then one day North heard a radio ad about a small, growing fabricator called MERRILL—then operating out of Saginaw—that was hiring welders. He ended up passing the company’s weld test, and the rest is history.

North was hired at MERRILL by Randy Yackel, the company’s operations manager who retired about a dozen years ago. “I consider him to be my greatest mentor,” North said. “He’s a very skilled individual, and not just with welding. I learned so much about leadership from him. He was a tool and die welder, and he worked on various nuclear applications. His knowledge was just tremendous. So I worked with him for a good number of years on various special projects, until he put me in the role early in my career to start working with new hires. This was years before we even thought about launching a school of our own.”

North continually used the words lucky and fortunate when talking about his early career, and for good reason. During his years at MERRILL he has seen the employment landscape shift dramatically. When he began his training role at MERRILL in 2001, he worked with new hires who had experiences that, at least to some extent, reflected his own. They either worked somewhere previously, or they grew up in an era when having some level of mechanical aptitude was just a way of life, almost taken for granted. They took shop in high school and thrived in a hands-on work environment. The last thing they wanted was to spend their days in front of a computer screen.

Then the applicant pool changed. More students graduated from high school without any real knowledge of manufacturing whatsoever. At the same time, demand for MERRILL’s services began to skyrocket. In the mid-2000s the company still operated in three separate facilities in Saginaw, and managers knew that if the company were to grow more and increase efficiency, it had no choice but to move fabrication under one roof. In 2007 MERRILL did just that, moving the operation from Saginaw to a 400,000-sq.-ft. plant in Alma.

This move boosted operational efficiency, but it also created some hiring challenges, especially for highly skilled welders. Alma is an hour’s drive from Saginaw, and some couldn’t make the move. “We were in full-blown hiring mode,” North recalled, “because we received some large contracts from several companies. At that point we had the idea of having our own school right inside the company.”

Managers knew the school couldn’t simply be dedicated to training welders for MERRILL. It’s a growing company, but it can’t hire every welder that graduates from a welding school. Besides, launching a school dedicated solely to employees would basically expand the company’s established in-house training program, and doing that wouldn’t solve what managers felt to be the root of the problem: a community that was becoming more and more disconnected from manufacturing.

To be sure, North has a knack for welding, good communication skills, and a healthy dose of empathy—all of which have helped him succeed as a welding educator. But he also had timing on his side. He worked in sheet metal as a teenager, and he gained knowledge of the welding craft from a string of mentors, all of whom were hands-on learners themselves.

Many students entering the welding field today don’t share this experience. They grew up with little to no knowledge of manufacturing. Their high school had no shop class or industrial vocational education of any sort. When they attended community college, they probably spent more time in a classroom and less time in a welding lab. The welding instructor probably would have liked more lab time, but welding machines cost money, and money does not run in abundance around the typical community college campus.

This is no secret to anyone in welding or, for that matter, any other job in manufacturing. As North and his colleagues saw it, they could sit around and complain, or they could figure out a solution. They chose the latter, and the idea behind Merrill Institute was born.

Then came the economic crash of 2008, which put the idea on hold. But by 2010 MERRILL began experiencing the rebound in a big way. The company needed welders, and the time was right for a welding school. The first class graduated in 2011.

Mirroring the Workday

Thirty years ago many operations got by with hiring applicants without formal training, thanks to a larger supply of applicants and a larger pool of industry veterans. North counts himself a beneficiary of that environment. Now those veterans are retired, the applicant pool is smaller, the work complexity keeps climbing, and lead times are shrinking.

That said, North doesn’t look at the past through rose-colored glasses. Even growing up in an environment with high school shop classes and hands-on projects at home, “I wish I had something like the Merrill Institute when I started. I would have benefited by leaps and bounds as a young man coming up through the ranks.”

The school offers scholarships and grants, and it has a partnership with the Michigan Works state employment program. But it does not accept federal student aid. As North explained, doing so would increase overhead costs (to manage the paperwork) that in MERRILL’s case would likely cancel out any benefits students would receive from financial aid. “And besides, if students are paying out of their own pocket, they have skin in the game.”

When launching the school, North soon sought accreditation from American Welding Society’s SENSE program, which incorporates standards and guidelines for welding education programs. Today the school remains accredited to AWS SENSE’s highest level. Instructors bring students through 12-week welding programs and, not least, regularly perform community outreach, visiting schools and other community centers. Young people don headsets of a virtual reality welder and gain at least an inkling of what welding is all about.

North and his team chose the AWS SENSE program mainly because of its flexibility. It gives graduates portable credentials accepted across Michigan and nationwide, but also gives Merrill Institute the flexibility to develop its own teaching methodologies. For North, those methods are anchored in the workday experience.

“Again, I model everything just like how the workday’s going to be,” North said. “This includes attitude, attendance, and communication skills.”

When welders show up for work, they don’t go to a classroom or spend time in the office. They’re on the floor where, yes, they weld, but they also talk with supervisors and co-workers, and perhaps partake in some morning or afternoon huddles before heading back and striking an arc.

For this reason, North keeps class time to a minimum. A prime example involves a basic discussion about GMAW and the relationship between stick-out and wire feed speed. “Instead of talking about it and drawing on a whiteboard, I just show them in the lab. I’ll weld a scrap coupon, and I’ll have students watch, wearing the right eye protection,” North said. “But they watch the ampmeter on the machine. I start with a normal wire stick-out; then I’ll increase it, getting further away with the stick-out. They pay attention to the amperage. Then I go really close, and they see how much the amperage fluctuates. This really hits home with them and shows them how important amperage is. Once you start changing your amperage, you change your weld penetration, you can have porosity, and you can affect so many other variables.

“I’ll also have my assistant change the wire feed speed as I weld. The students watch it, and the lightbulbs come on. ‘Wow,’ they tell me. ‘That changes everything.’” North asks questions, discussions ensue, and then, just like one would during a typical workday, they head back to their welding stations to weld.

A Foundation for On-the-Job Training

Developing a welder is a two-part process: solid training in the fundamentals followed by on-the-job training that keeps professional welders learning for years, from noncode work all the way through the most critical structural and nuclear welds with stringent certification requirements.

North was MERRILL’s first certified welding inspector (CWI), and today the manufacturer employs five others. When the company selects someone to be trained and tested as a CWI, it ensures that person has a high level of welding skill as well as good communication and coaching skills. As North explained, the company’s welding operation needs a solid structure that supports its welders. CWIs who can’t explain exactly why a weld doesn’t pass inspection—as well as what a welder can do about it—aren’t helping anyone.

Watching a CWI work with the company’s top-level, code-certified welders shows how the best welders never really stop learning. In fact, a few of MERRILL’s code-certified welders are Merrill Institute graduates. They began with noncritical work, then—thanks to the solid foundation provided by the institute—moved up the ladder quickly, first to AWS D1.1 structural welding, then to ASME Section IX for pressure vessel work. A few might progress on to achieve their NAVSEA or other specialized certifications.

The road starts with a solid foundation. In the past, the community experience—working on the farm, learning tool basics in shop class, repairing cars—provided at least some of that foundation. Now, with that community disconnect, rookies never get a chance to gain that footing. But as the Merrill Institute proves, nothing says that rookies can’t gain that solid foundation somewhere else.

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