Wednesday, October 9, 2024
MARINETTE – In just eight hours, Hazel Knutson of Marinette hopes to create a sculpture and weld her way to the top of the heap at a Welding Rodeo taking place Oct. 9 at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College on its Marinette campus. The event is free and open to the public.
She’ll be prepared for the heat with leather jacket, thick insulated gloves, heat shield, helmet and hair net – to prevent her hair from burning.
“It gets really, really hot,” she said about welding.
Knutson of Marinette, who took advanced welding at NWTC in a dual-enrollment program while a Marinette High School student, is enrolled in the college’s one-year program leading to a Welding Technical Diploma. She said she has been burned “plenty of times,” but still finds it a rewarding career choice. “I’m super excited to be making these things,” she said.
With demand for welders outpacing supply, the technical college is encouraging other high school students and young adults to consider welding as a career, said Cindy Bailey, dean of NWTC’s Marinette campus.
NWTC decided to hold the Welding Rodeo to generate excitement for careers in welding and other technical fields. The event with a catchy name is modeled after a similar one held in Bellingham, Washington, Bailey said.
“The Welding Rodeo is a true testament to the collaboration between our college, industry and community,” she said. It also will showcase “the creativity and versatility of welding that might not be widely known,” Bailey said.
While the welding competition might be the flashiest component of the free full-day event from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., the careers event also will include a STEM Fair offering information on career paths in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Food trucks and entertainment will round out the day. The event is open to the public.
With local manufacturers Fincantieri Marinette Marine, Enstrom Helicopter and Waupaca Foundry hiring welders on a regular basis, NWTC aims to train workers for productive careers. The technical college received a $600,000 grant last spring from the U.S. Department of the Navy to attract shipbuilding talent to Northeast Wisconsin, Bailey said. This year, it has 11 students in its welding program.
With a starting wage of over $20 an hour, NWTC graduates surveyed were earning about $48,000 a year within six months of completing the program, said Tom Topper, welding instructor at NWTC’s Marinette campus.
“I have strong connections with local employers, which gives me valuable insights into our current and future workforce needs,” he said. “I’ve noticed significant demand for skilled welders. Our students are getting employed immediately after graduation.”
Fincantieri Marinette Marine lists open welder positions on its careers site, but the number of openings could be higher than what’s listed, said Eric Dent, director of communications at Fincantieri Marinette Marine.
“If you go to our Careers page (https://myjobs.adp.com/fmgexternaljobs/cx?__tx_annotation=false&c=2155013&d=FMG-External&sor=adprm), you can see something like 124 jobs available, but that is not the number of positions we have open. It says we have a welder position at FMM, but really there are many positions under the same title. We get questions about that from time to time. Those are job titles that represent more than one actual position,” Dent send in an email response to a reporter’s questions.
“Welders have transportable skills and are in high demand throughout industry, so when two welders decide to leave our company, we have to hire more than what we need to account for attrition too,” he said.
The Italy-based shipbuilder, with local shipyards in Marinette and Sturgeon Bay, has several apprentice programs that involve welding, Dent said.
“We have a relationship with NWTC to provide training to welders,” he said. “In fact, we have increased our throughput with them” in Marinette, where it builds ships for U.S. and overseas military operations and at Fincantieri Bay Shipbulding in Sturgeon Bay, which builds commercial, Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers’ vessels
Topper said the welding program at NWTC is a long-standing one. He was a student in the program in 1988, he said. “We live in a very large manufacturing area,” he said. But with welders in demand, graduates of NWTC’s program have the potential to work wherever they would like to, he said.
Those well suited for welding careers have good eye-hand coordination, patience and an affinity for math, Topper said. The 32-credit program includes 18 credits in blueprint reading, metal fabrication, metallurgy and math courses, he said.
At NWTC’s first-ever Welding Rodeo, Knutson will be teamed up with high school welding students and tasked with completing a welding project under a time limit on the theme of “Soar Higher.”
“There’s no real instructions on what they can create. We’re totally leaving it up to what they want to build,” Topper said.
Knutson said she has previously made a pull-up bar for pole vaulters and a night stand. “It is super fun to do,” she said, and welding allows you to make a mistake and then fix it.
Knutson is following in the footsteps of her father, who worked for Ansul before it was acquired by Johnson Controls, and her grandmother, a hang glider in World War II, she said. She hopes to land a welding job at Johnson Controls or another manufacturer when she completes the program.
