How to become a welder

The route from never having struck an arc to holding a qualification somebody will pay for. It is shorter than most trades and longer than the course brochures suggest.

Start with one process

MMA or MAG. MMA teaches you to read the pool, because everything happens slowly and visibly, and the equipment is simple enough that nothing hides behind a setting. MAG is what most fabrication shops actually run, so it gets you employed sooner.

Either is a defensible first choice. What is not defensible is trying to learn three at once: the muscle memory is different for each, and splitting the practice means none of them become automatic. Add TIG later, when the first process is boring.

The practice nobody budgets for

A typical course gives thirty to forty hours at the bench. Competence takes something like a hundred. The difference has to come from somewhere: your own machine and a pile of offcuts, or an employer who lets you practise, or evening access at the training centre.

Practise deliberately rather than by volume. Run beads on plate until they are the same width along their whole length. Then fillets, then butts with a gap, then the same joints in PF. Cut your welds and look at the section — a macro-section, even an unetched one, tells you more about your penetration than a photograph of the bead face ever will.

The certificate

An examination at an accredited body, to EN ISO 9606-1. It is not the same thing as a course certificate, and the difference is the whole point: one records attendance, the other records an examined test piece that was destructively tested.

Choose the test position deliberately, because positions cover downwards. A test in PF covers PA and PB; a test in PA covers almost nothing else. Paying twice — once for the easy test and again for the useful one — is a common and avoidable expense. What a given test covers is worked out in the qualification range calculator, and the examination itself is described in the EN ISO 9606 test.

Where it goes from there

The pay curve follows the certificates and the positions. Plate MAG in the flat position is the entry level. Pipe, positional work, TIG root runs, stainless and duplex, and offshore or pressure work are the steps up, and each one is a combination of another qualification and another few hundred hours.

Beyond welding itself the routes are inspection — a visual inspection qualification and then a welding inspector certification — and coordination, the IWS and IWE route, which moves you from making the welds to specifying them. Both pay better than the arc and both start from having welded.

What the certificates and courses cost, and what welders are actually paid, is in welding course cost and what a welder earns.

Updated: 14 August 2026