How to Hire the Welding Engineer You Really Need

—  Warning —
If your company makes welded assemblies this information is worth
hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year in profits.

Searching for a welding engineer or welding engineering manager isn’t an easy task for an HR staffer or professional recruiter. For many reasons, there aren’t many of us Welding Engineers out here. And 70% of job-titled “Welding Engineers” have little or no training in the welding physics and sciences and so are largely or completely unqualified – knowing enough to enable the welding processes, but often carrying enough influence and ignorance to drive companies right out of business. But to complicate the picture, all three recognized Welding Engineering programs have very different approaches and very different ideas as to what a Welding Engineer really is and should be doing.

Caution:  Welding Engineering training and experience is mainly process-specific and/or material-specific, not industry-specific. This has broader implications, but it’s critical to understand that their skills and expertise easily transfer across completely unrelated industries. Your search can easily turn up dry if you think your competion for a welding engineer is your competitors, because it’s not.  You’re looking for process expertise, and your search competition is all industries that weld similar materials and thicknesses.

Formal education is just the beginning of the story because once they’re out in the workforce, degreed welding engineers tend to lean into different areas.  A W.E. might lean toward heavy-wall welding, meaning it’s either piping, structural, off-road heavy equipment, or pressure-vessel, and normally includes a lot of manual welding management, welder training and certifications. Or a W.E. might lean toward the thin “gauge-thickness” materials. In terms of experience, those two worlds (thick or thin) are probably the greatest differences.  Beyond that, they might have a strong affinity for manual hand-welding environments, or for welding automation, or for metallurgy, “exotic” materials, testing, training, process optimization/control or R&D work.

As a personal example, over the years I have been compelled to conclude that I have some world-class skills in an environment of welding automation on gauge-thickness materials.  In that arena, I can excel to a level that makes most welding engineers and welding equipment manufacturers seem rather incompetent – I always find myself trying to figure out who is trainable that I can develop as a welding engineer or equipment supplier.  Can I handle an exclusively manual welding environment of heavy-wall code work that can’t or doesn’t want to move any of it into welding automation?  I’ve been trained, I’ve had exposure, but exclusively manual heavy-wall code welding is not my thing.  I could eventually grow into it, but many W.E.’s are better suited and it might be a waste of my individual talents.  Why not hire the right guy and support him?

A recruiter friend of mine, Kirk Abraham, recently said or quoted “Robots are fast, accurate & stupid. Humans are slow, sloppy & brilliant.”  Too many companies either can’t see the value in having brilliant humans teach robots to be fast and accurate, or they sense wisdom in the idea but just don’t know how to get there.

Then there’s the company or client side of the picture, which frankly can be structured to make the task of filling a WE opening… impossible. There are many pitfalls. After years of watching and participating in this sometimes painful dance either personally or by proxy of fellow welding engineers, I hope my perspectives may be a dramatic help to you as you work to fill your welding engineering position. Along the way I’ll discuss experience, job title, job description, responsibilities, compensation, training skills, strategic issues, and much more.  Here we go!

Welding Engineer Salary Compensation Data

In January I found this question that had been posted in a members-only forum last fall, asking where to find solid data on Welding Engineering salaries.  Until I responded near the end of January, not much help had been offered.  There’s some good content on management & HR perspectives, and some of the challenges in building a high performance welding team.  But mostly I want to put out his question with the answer I posted, to see if anyone else can offer data or suggestions.  And if someone wants an excellent project that could strongly benefit many metalworking industries, their HR staff, the welding engineering profession, and recruiting networks – here’s a wonderful opportunity to contribute.

Hello Everyone,

I am looking for a realistic comparison of WE salaries. I have been searching the web, but have found very little applicable data. I am looking for average salaries within the WE field, specifically in the 0-5 years experience range. If anyone can offer any help, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Dave

Dave –
There is a real need for better data on Welding Engineering salaries. Having personally interviewed 150-200 WE’s over the last 3 years, and hunting hard to assemble justification for realistic market salaries while hiring 9 BSWE welding engineers, I learned some things that few understand.

OSU and Ferris State have data on WE grad starting salaries. OSU’s is most complete and easiest to find online, the last I knew. The best data I’ve ever found on welding engineering career salaries is at ThinkEnergy-dot-com. BUT, there’s a huge caveat that they don’t tell you about. While they track Welding Engineering, they do not distinguish non-degreed from degreed WE’s: all figures are lumped together purely by Job Title. That doesn’t sound bad until you realize it’s not at all like other engineering fields, where most Civil Engineers or Chemical Engineers actually are trained in their disciplines – which is why the W.E. salaries look much too low. In the U.S., according to Dr. Yoni Adonyi (Professor of Materials Joining Engineering, LeTourneau University), about SEVENTY PERCENT of “Welding Engineers” are merely appointed to the job title. That’s because they need someone and either can’t find a real W.E., think they don’t need a real W.E., or they aren’t willing to pay for one (for various reasons). The stand-in may have a vocational welding certificate, or an Associates or Bachelors in another field, but in most cases their welding training is very limited.

Advice for Recruiter Client’s Welding Engineer position – #2

This is the SECOND in a series of responses from my e-mail archives, which I’m publishing because the Recruiters noted them as helpful advise and perspective on their client’s Welding Engineering search. Most recruiters and even most HR Managers have little experience or exposure to the Welding Engineering segment because it’s so small. It’s my hope that these will help increase understanding of some of the realities, needs, obstacles and rewards in finding and retaining degreed welding engineers.

—

I read the job description you sent, and Wow. To softly summarize, your Asian-car-company client would be well advised to change their strategy on this position. Why not wisely select a Smart Welding Engineer and let them do their job?

OK, let me take the velvet gloves off for a minute. Don’t take this wrong, but after reading the job description, here’s my very blunt assessment:

“Welding Specialist” is a bad start for the job title. It might be simple ignorance, it could be an inadequate Asian cultural translation, it could be mimicking poor practices in the “Big Three”, or it could be someone’s “clever” idea to save money, but that job description is the role of a BS-degreed Welding Engineer. That’s what they are trained to do: the average BSWE (or equivalent) has 3,000 – 4,000 hours of classroom and hands-on training in the welding processes.  Filling that welding engineer role with anyone else is like taking a CFO position, relabeling it as “Financial Supervisor”, and requiring candidates to have any Bachelor of Arts degree instead of an MBA.  Yeh, a stunning cost-savings idea there.

If they don’t hire a BS-degreed Welding Engineer for this position, it will probably save them $20-40k a year and cost them a minimum $500k (if not several $M) in the first 3 months of startup alone, vs a qualified Smart Welding Engineer. But unfortunately, as that happens, there’s rarely anyone around who’s qualified enough to recognize the losses and missed opportunities and attribute them to targeting and hiring an unqualified person. Even if the “Welding Specialist” knows it, are they likely to be explaining to management that they can’t do their job justice? 

Advice for Recruiter Client’s Welding Engineer position – #1

This is the FIRST in a series of responses from my e-mail archives, which I’m publishing because the Recruiters noted them as helpful advise and perspective on their client’s Welding Engineering positions. Most recruiters and even most HR Managers have little experience or exposure to the Welding Engineering segment because it’s so small. It’s my hope that these will help increase understanding of some of the realities, needs, obstacles and rewards in finding and retaining degreed welding engineers.

Regarding the “#41XXX Welding Engineer Position”, if I could offer some advice for your client as a degreed W.E. with 21 years experience who has interviewed roughly 200 Welding Engineers to hire about 10 W.E.’s in the last 5 years…

A salary range of $44-55k is unrealistic for a degreed Welding Engineer with 3-5 yrs experience unless their cost of living is 20-50% below the national average.

There are only three ABET accredited W.E. universities in the nation: LeTourneau University, Ferris State University, and The Ohio State University. At OSU (for example), the average starting salary is about $60k for a brand new (2008) graduate. Recent LeTourneau University graduate majors are Materials Joining Engineering instead of Welding Engineering. After 3 years experience, average 2nd position starts at about $70k. With 5 yrs experience, a good degreed W.E. with the capabilities they’re looking for is likely going to be in the $65-$80k range.

Keep in mind that there are only about 100 W.E. graduates a year, totaled from the 3 schools. That’s why about 70% of the “Welding Engineers” in industry are only titled as W.E.’s. Those 70% are people, some with other engineering degrees and some with none, who can ENABLE the welding processes. However, of the 30% of degreed Welding Engineers, only about half of them can optimize processes for excellent profitability and quality. That’s why the best W.E.’s, with experience, make $75-120k base salaries: they are the only ones who can make profitability differences measured in millions of dollars.

Most recruiters and even most HR Managers have little experience or exposure to the Welding Engineering segment because it’s so small. So I hope that helps. If you have any other W.E. position openings that could benefit from strong expertise with a history of dramatic process improvements beyond the “benchmark” performance standards, let me know…

Brian Dobben

2nd in this series:  https://weldsparks.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/advice-for-recruiter-clients-welding-engineer-position-2/