A very special episode of Arc Junkies

Many people don’t believe it, but sometimes people don’t spend a ton of time on the internet. They even like magazines.

That’s why The FABRICATOR thought it might be interesting to share a lively conversation that occurred at FABTECH® 2018 last November in Atlanta. ESAB Welding & Cutting Products hosted Jimmy McKnight and his Arc Junkies podcast from the company’s booth. His guests on that day were Bob Moffatt of the weld.com videos on YouTube, Jody Collier of www.weldingtipsandtricks.com, and Ian Johnson of Big Tire Garage. Here’s an edited transcript of their conversation.

Jimmy McKnight: Bob, what are some of the skills gaps that you see people running into in the industry, and what do you think they could do to prepare themselves for that?

Bob Moffatt: Skill sets. You need to know codes and procedures, or at least know the worksmanship standards you need to meet in your work. Understand them, understand the parameters around them. You need to have that background knowledge of processes, the science of welding, and then the art of welding. The science is the chemistry, metallurgy, and gases; the art is your actual, physical weldment.

McKnight: Jody, what are the attributes shared by the best welders, and what do you think is the proper mindset that you need to have?

Jody Collier: A friend of mine, Roy, that I do our podcast with, told me he got some really good advice early on as a welder: Have a machinist mindset and pay attention to detail. If the tolerance is ±-1/8 inch, maybe you shoot for ±1/32 or less.

McKnight: Set your standards really high.

Collier: Right. Also, just have a good work ethic. Show up early and put out an adequate balance of quality and quantity. Usually one or the other is not enough. You have to do both. If you can’t stay off your phone, maybe leave it in the car. Just be a good worker. Be the kind of employee or the kind of welder that you would want to hire that would make you money.

McKnight: Ian, what is a good way to turn your passion into a career, realistically?

Ian Johnson: Everyone says that if you turn your passion into your career, you’re not going to work a day in your life. That’s a lie. Basically, if you turn your passion into a career, you trade your 9-to-5 job for a 24/7, but I think it’s a good thing. I think everyone’s passionate about something, no matter what it is, and I think that whole idea of turning your passion into a career or your hobby into your career, for most of us out here, any type of tradesperson, a lot of us can relate. I was a mechanic; I’m still a mechanic. I was a teacher; I’m still a teacher. I may have a different job now, I may do different things, but I’m still a mechanic. You’re still a welder.

I think that’s just the nature of the trades themselves. You are in that boat already. You might not know it, but you’re already there.

McKnight: You hear a lot about different welding pay from entry level to top 10 percent of the welders that are out there. What do you feel is a good starting wage for somebody just getting into the industry?

Collier: More than it is right now. It’s a problem. Some of the skills gap could be fixed by improving wages, but welding jobs are all over the board, so I don’t think you could say there’s one good starting wage. But I do think it needs to come up.

McKnight: Welding jobs are $15 to $19 an hour now. But they want you to have thousands of dollars’ worth of tools. They want you to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And then you have burger joints out West that are paying $15 an hour, and people are like, “Well, why am I going to work all these hours and bring in all these tools and have to go through all this schooling when I could just ring somebody up or I could flip a burger and make close to the same wage?”

Johnson: I was talking to a friend of mine who has a young kid working for him, and he was asking if he should get certified. I grew up in a factory town, so when I graduated high school in 1991, I could go work at Hershey Chocolate and make $21.25 an hour, or I could be a mechanic and make $7.25 an hour to start. I chose the $7.25, because I figured if you’re a mechanic and you’re certified, no one can ever take that certification away. The factory can go away tomorrow—and it did—and then everyone who was there making $21.25 was scrambling for any job.

If you have a certification or some type of trade certification or a license or ASE certification like I have, there’s always that ability to find work. You’re not beholden to just that one burger job because you never know when that stuff will disappear in a heartbeat.

McKnight: Yeah, that’s true. Say you get to the point where you can start your own company. Now you go from putting in a 40-

hour week to working 24/7, basically. What are some of the other things that can come up when you start your own company?

Johnson: I have learned two big things from all my career changes. No. 1 is the business side of things. Everyone thinks, “Oh, I can weld or I can fix a car or I can build something,” but that’s only about 10 percent of a business. There’s 90 percent of all that other stuff, and I’m a firm believer that education never ends. The minute that you think you know everything, it’s over. You know nothing. If you want to start a business or improve yourself, education is the key to unlock that door, whether that’s learning how to keep your books and balance your accounts or knowing the difference between an LLC and an incorporated company. That’s the stuff that comes out of left field that just knocks you over.

McKnight: How important is it for a student getting out of welding school to have an open mind when they get into the field? You might have been the rock star in your class, but now when you get out into the field, you realize that you really don’t know as much as you thought, and that can deter people from the trade.

Moffatt: My advice to any student that goes out the door is stay off your phone, show up early, stay late, and ask questions. I tell my students, “You need to shut your mouth and go to work and show up on time for a year. Then you’ve got a work record.” It’s your work ethic, your work standard.

Always show up on time and be dependable. It infuriates me when I have students that show up late or not at all, and I think society has kind of gone that way. Maybe it’s just in my area, but dependability and attendance are a big thing to me.

If I’m going to work for Ian because he has a successful business going, does he want me to show up on time, or is it OK if I just show up whenever I want? He wants me there on time so he can plan his day, and he probably wants me there five days out of five days.

I don’t understand people these days. They’ve got an excuse for everything. I think that’s what’s wrong with our workplace sometimes: lack of dependability.

McKnight: All three of you have really taken your careers to new heights. When you first got into this, who inspired you the most to get into welding and metal fabricating?

Collier: I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I was in college, floundering, and decided I wanted to work with my hands. The college thing wasn’t for me, and I happened to move across the street from the welding instructor. I said, “I want to get in the auto-mechanics program up there where you teach.” He said, “Well, they’re full, but I can get you in welding,” and that’s how I got in welding.

He was not only the guy that got me in, but he was my ride every day, and he cared, and he showed me a lot of stuff, and he was very approachable. He would share freely what he knew. He wanted me to succeed, and I really appreciate what he did. I have to say he had more influence on me than anybody early on, that first guy that got me involved in it.

Johnson: Mine’s about the same. I had the unfortunate situation that my father was my high school principal, and my mother was the vice principal of the other high school that I could go to, but I knew at 16 years old that I wanted to work with my hands and be a mechanic. When I told my guidance counselor, “I want to be a mechanic,” she kept telling me about engineering schools. I said, “No, I said mechanic. I want to be a mechanic.” And she said, “Well, we both know that your father is not going to let me show you how to be a mechanic if I want to keep my job at this high school,” so I quit the school that afternoon and drove to the other high school. I walked in the guidance counselor’s office and said, “I want to be a mechanic,” and he said, “You can be whoever you want to be.” He didn’t know who I was.

So he put me on the track—and I’m from Canada, where we have a heavy apprenticeship program—and I signed my papers right then and started my mechanic apprenticeship.

We are friends to this day, and when I left auto-mechanics to become a shop teacher, he was the guy I called because he had gone that route. I became a shop teacher, and he helped guide me through that. I think that all of us probably have that one person. It’s important.

Moffatt: . My father worked in the oil fields in Oklahoma, and I had a brother-in-law who was a successful pipe welder, so that’s how I got started. At one time, I was going to go into the Air Force, because I wanted the Air Force metallurgy Ohio state inspection, all that kind of stuff. And my mom said, “Before you sign those papers, you might want to talk to your dad.” My dad came in and told me that he appreciated my trying to follow in his steps—he was in the Air Force in World War II—but he got shot down over Holland and spent 20 months as a POW, and he didn’t want me to kind of follow him in that direction.

So I remained a civilian and got into the oil business with my father. I went through a trade school, went on to drafting and design, went to Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls, Ore., and worked as a millwright.

One of our lead men was a craftsman of unbelievable skill. His woodworking was unbelievable, and his layout was impeccable. It was extremely accurate, so from an early age as a construction millwright in a plywood mill, I had that work quality instilled in me.

Everything that we built as construction millwrights needed to be functional, square, and level with the world, and it needed to work. What we put together or maintained or rebuilt needed to be done right, and so I was very fortunate. I worked with my lead man, my machining instructor, and my welding instructor from the college, and I was on a very small crew at a very young age. I was 20 years old, and I was very fortunate to get on it, and I got on it simply because I had oilfield and mechanical and welding experience.

McKnight: What advice would you offer your 20-year-old selves if you could?

Moffatt: Like I said earlier, unless you’re working for yourself, you need to be dependable. And if you’re working for yourself, you still need to manage your time. Things pop up in the day, and it gets crazy.

Collier: I would’ve asked more questions. I rode back and forth to school with my welding instructor, but I was painfully shy until I was in my 20s, and we wouldn’t speak. I had an encyclopedia of welding knowledge sitting next to me in the truck, and I could’ve asked him all kinds of questions, but I didn’t ask him. I started working with Delta in 1990, but before that I didn’t even know they had a jet base or did overhaul on engines there in Atlanta. I could’ve asked and found out.

If you and I could have gone to a FABTECH show when we were breaking into the trade, we might’ve taken different directions, and it worked out OK for both of us, but I didn’t know there were so many choices of ways to go.

Moffatt: I probably would’ve gone more into the CNC cutting. From when I started in 1974 until now, what’s changed? The alloys are still the same, the gases are still the same. Yeah, we’ve developed some alloys, some superalloys that we’ve kind of figured out how to weld, but what’s actually changed? Technology. It’s the 800-pound, 300-amp machine versus a 300-amp machine that we can pick up and carry. It’s the advanced electronics in how we drive filler metal into the joint and what we’re doing to play with the weld puddle and control it. That’s what’s changed, in my perspective.

Johnson: Probably the first thing I would say to myself would be the truth: “You know nothing.” I thought I knew everything when I was 18, but the entry-level guys just have to hit that humbling wall. We’ve all hit it. We’re apprentices, and we have a tradesperson teaching us, and they have to let us drop that ball.

And I would tell myself to keep learning. Shut up and listen and ask more questions. The first time I painted a car, I was 18 years old, and I remember I walked into the paint store, I bought the paint, and the guy said, “Now, you have to flash time that off for X number of minutes. You know what that means, right?” And I was 18, so I said, “Of course I do.” But I had no idea what that meant. I went home and painted that truck, and it was a mess because I didn’t know how to paint a truck. I knew that paint booths got hot, so I sealed up the entire garage, turned the heat up way high, and it was not a good scene. Education costs money, time, or brain cells, so if you can avoid that by asking a question, it’ll be a lot cheaper in the long run.

McKnight: I try to tell people to get as many feathers in your hat as possible when it comes to this stuff. I mean, I’ll use Jesse James as an example. He may be the pope of welding on Instagram, but he’s also arguably one of the greatest bike builders in the world. Now, how much of building the bike is actually welding? About that much. He had to learn all those different things to get to the level that he is. All of those different feathers in his hat eventually made him who he is.

Speaking of Instagram—since it has really taken over the welding community, and it’s an excellent tool that a lot of welders use to get business or get jobs—what are some of the techniques that you use on social media to get your work and your message out to people?

Collier: Well, I have a YouTube channel, and I try to put it out there the way I’d want to receive it. You have to put yourself in the viewer’s shoes. Am I talking too long? Am I giving enough information? Too much? Try to put something out there that you would want to consume and that you could learn from.

If you put your heart and soul into something and your intent is pure, it’ll probably have the desired effect. That person will learn from it, people will benefit from it, and you will too.

Moffatt: I’m kind of a greenhorn on Instagram. I do post weld pictures, stuff that goes on in our shop daily. I try to get the students involved in comparison work, so we put out sample welds that we’re doing at the time. But I don’t treat my account as pure welding or pure promotion of sample welds or anything like that.

People have gotten ahold of me at all hours of the day and night asking advice, and that’s fine. If I can help them, I certainly will. And I’ve contacted people at times over Instagram private message too. I don’t know it all, so if I need help with something, a little technique or something that I thought was cool, I ask how they do it. I don’t want to copy it, but I might want to use that tool or concept to create something for myself that’s a bit different. Instagram is fun, and it’s powerful, and we share welding techniques.

Collier: If you’re a welder and you’re not on Instagram, you’re missing out. One of the better welding communities I’ve ever seen is on Instagram. There is a lot of willingness to help each other and share information. It’s inspirational and humbling at the same time. The quality of work that’s being done out there is amazing, and the information being shared on Instagram is amazing, so I’d encourage you to get on if you’re not on. I was late to the party getting on, but I’m glad I did.

Johnson: I agree with that. I think social media legitimately has removed all barriers for any type of promotion or public display of anything, so that’s good and bad. The only advice I would give anybody on Instagram is the same as I’d give my son: Be the same person online that you want to be in real life.

And if you want to ask questions, it’s the same thing. I’ve had problems with some setups, and I’ve sent out to everybody that I know on Instagram: “Listen, this is legitimately what happened. What did I do wrong?” And we send messages back and forth.

McKnight: Yep, so make it you, make it real, and don’t be afraid to show your failures as well.

Johnson: Oh, absolutely not.

McKnight: Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s a machine. Nobody’s putting out absolutely perfect stuff all the time. Showing your failures shows you’re learning as well, and people want to go along that journey with you. They want to see your failures. Show that. It’s very, very important because nobody’s perfect at all.

Let’s open it up to questions.

Question 1: What do you think of when you hear the phrase “production welder”?

Moffatt: When I just hear the phrase, the first impression is somebody in a factory cranking out piecework; the same weld day in, day out, all day long.

Collier: Pretty much the same thing here. Initially what comes to mind is just pulling a trigger on a MIG gun and holding on and blow and go, but I know people who technically are production welders, and there’s a whole lot more to it. It’s all over the board, and all production welders aren’t the same.

McKnight: You’re right, they’re not. When people hear “production welding,” they think the lower-pay, menial job where they’re just pumping out parts. That’s part of it, but there is also the very high-dollar part where they could be doing an order of 50 military-grade pumps to military spec, and that’s technically production welding as well.

Question 2: How do I avoid production welding?

Collier: Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes that’s your first rung of the ladder. Just try not to stay there.

McKnight: It’s a good place to start, a great place to visit, but you don’t want to live there.

Johnson: I would say it’s the same as every job. Every job’s got an entry-level point, and there are people who stay at an entry-level point at any job. It’s like that guy doing burgers, but next week, it’s the fries. That’s just the reality. I think if you get there and have that mindset that this is where you are and this is where you’re going to be, then that’s where you’re going to stay, and that’s the truth in any job.

Moffatt: I like being a production welder, by the true definition of a piece worker. I had a friend from school connect with me on Facebook after a lot of years. He owns his own company, and he was bidding on some military parts. He didn’t know the specs, so he called me for help. I looked at the print and told him what to ignore and what to pay attention to, because it had small-, intricate-tolerance welds, and I told him how I would bid if it were me.

He called me two weeks later and said, “I bid high on this project, like you said, and nobody in Dallas wants to weld on it.” And I said, “Well, start cutting parts. I’m on my way.” I loaded up some equipment, headed to his house, and started welding these parts. His parts were impeccable. He built a jig, and I didn’t even need to clamp parts down. Everything fit so nicely.

So I was welding the parts and he said, “Hey, I bid those at 25 bucks. Can you keep me under that?” I said, “Yeah, you bet. How about 20? Is that fair?” He said yes, so I said, “Well, you need to crank up those machines, because I’m making one every five minutes.” I did $20 every five minutes. Production worker.

Question 3: Do you think we’re going to lose a lot of talented people in the industry because there’s a problem with getting the pay they deserve? How do we avoid that?

McKnight: I honestly think you will if it’s not addressed and fixed soon. You are going to see lots of talented people taking other avenues to make money, because why would they stay in a field where they’re not appreciated at their job or in their paycheck? It is a part of the ugly truth of the industry. It’s almost insulting some of the wages that are out there for welders right now—guys that are extremely talented, extremely certified.

It’s almost to the point that you can’t become a journeyman welder unless you are in the ironworkers’ union, yet we have how many certifications for welders outside of the union? You have how many guys that are journeyman level but can’t achieve that without getting into the union?

They’re like, “I’ve been in this for so long. I’ve been trying for so long, but I don’t know the right people to get into this job, so I’m going to go and do something else,” and unfortunately you see that happening more and more. We almost need our own welders’ union, just like the electricians have their own union, the plumbers have their own union, the carpenters have their own union. They’re all given journeyman-level licenses at a certain point, and they all receive journeyman pay scale, whereas you have the welder that works in the shop at exactly that level to meet code and can’t pay his bills because he’s not being paid a journeyman-level wage.

The income inequality is frankly—you can quote me on this—disgusting. And we need to do something about that at least to start getting people more interested in this. Like we discussed earlier, why would you do this when you could go work elsewhere and make a comparable wage?

Question 4: What’s your take on robots coming into the industry?

Moffatt: They’re just production workers.

Johnson: They do what we tell them.

McKnight: Personally, I think the rise that you’re seeing in automation is the answer to what we were talking about earlier, about how you can’t find people to get into these jobs. You can’t find people to fill the work, so they are buying robots to do the job.

It’s not like they’re coming to take our jobs or anything like that, but they are creating jobs in a certain way. At the same time, times are changing. There’s the classic example of the guy that made the wagon wheel. Then the car was invented. That guy had to figure out how to adapt and adapt quick if he was going to keep making money. It’s the same thing with this rise of automation. The robots are coming. They are not going to stop. It’s up to you to stay ahead of the curve and stay educated enough and skilled enough that you beat them.

Collier: If you really understand the welding process being used by that robot and you’re the guy that can learn how to program that robot, your stock just went up. You’re a very valuable asset to that company, because a lot of robot programmers will not understand the welding process, and when that part goes wrong, they’ve got a lot of defects that cost a lot of money. So they need somebody that used to be a welder and maybe wanted to expand their horizons a little bit and now can program robots. So what seems like it’s killing jobs, there are opportunities that come along with that.

Arc Junkies Podcast, www.arcjunkies.com

Big Tire Garage, www.bigtiregarage.com

Weld.com on YouTube, www.youtube.com/channel/UCM0kHJXSHR1k1wtLuliKmHg

Welding Tips and Tricks, www.weldingtipsandtricks.com

ESAB Welding & Cutting Products, www.esabna.com