Okay, so in this video I've made up a list of five pros and five cons of being a welder and these things are based on Guys that weld full-time as a career not part-time on the side or as a hobby Full-time as a welder and these this kind of geared more towards guys that want to make over a hundred thousand dollars a year So how I came up with this list is throughout my years of experience I'm 24 years old. I have seven years experience in the welding industry and for those seven years for most of it I've been a certified ticketed welder and now I've been a journeyman boilermaker now for one year. So I finished an apprenticeship in boilermaking which is a super if not the most super versatile welding trade there is. Okay so the first pro is the one everybody wants to hear and that is pay.
Yes, in welding you can make a lot of money and make over $100,000 USD. You can make over $200,000. You can make over $300,000 in a supervisor or superintendent position. So yes, there is big money in welding and they're like insane money. especially in the supervisor's positions or just as a welder.
But the pro, one main biggest pro, is that there's very good money in being a welder. Okay, so con number one would be that there is not good money in being a welder. And what I mean by that is about 80% of the jobs of being a welder pay under $100,000 a year. And that is because there's a huge amount of welders out there. People don't know much about welding.
See mostly on Instagram is guys. I mean, the most popular stuff is guys welding pipe and oil industry kind of stuff. That's higher end things.
A lot of those videos are guys in shops. If you work in a shop, you're really not going to make that much money. I mean, you can make good money, but not crazy.
Where the big money, the over $100,000 a year. pay starts happening is when you are highly skilled, chase, you know, skilled work, and you're traveling and you're working for big industry. So what I mean by that is oil and gas, energy, steel production, big product production like pulp mills and then mining industry stuff, aerospace, you know, stuff like that, big industry things. Gold mining, just a lot of this big industry stuff. Not so much, you know, there's a lot of jobs out there like welding catalytic converters for big diesel motors.
They're all stainless. It's all stainless steel TIG. They pay like $20 an hour Canadian, which is like $17 an hour American.
There's a lot of jobs out there that don't really pay much. And that would be 80% of the jobs out there, you're making less than $100,000 a year. because they're not major, there's not a whole lot of risk and time involved in them.
They're working in a shop 40 hours a week or maybe a bit more, but you're working in a shop, you go to the same location every day. So there's a lot of jobs out there that don't really pay that well. So that's a con of welding. Statistically, most of the jobs out there don't pay over $100,000 a year. They still pay good, but not great.
So don't think that as soon as you're a welder, you're going to make $100,000 a year. because that's just not how it works. You've got to chase your skill up.
You've got to get better skill. You've got to be able to pass weld tests and weld on pipe, tube, plate, whatever, a bunch of different processes, and you've got to go work for these big pocket companies. The more money the people you work for make, the more money you're going to make.
So if you work for a guy that makes roughly $600,000 a year out of a small welding business, you're really not going to make that much money. You go work for... like Shell or you go work at some big oil refinery where they're making billions of dollars, obviously they're going to be able to compensate you much more for your work.
So a lot of the work out there isn't in that big industry or it supports it and it still is in that industry, but it's not directly connected. So you don't make a lot of money. So that is a con. There's technically, statistically, welders don't make over $100,000 a year. So there is not...
You got to find the big paying jobs just because you're a welder does not mean you're gonna make a lot of money Okay, so pro number two is that you don't really need to spend a lot of money to Have the tooling to be a welder now a lot of people right now are probably confused because they think you need to go spend $150,000 and build this insane pipeline welding rig with American force wheels and a Lincoln Vantage 400 or whatever You don't need to do that. There's a lot of jobs out there In fact, most of the welding jobs like probably around the 90 plus percent Don't require you to own your own rig truck. Don't even require you to own a truck You can some of them you don't even need a car. You can take public transit like there's a the idea that if you're working construction you need a truck is It was made up by guys that want to sell you a truck for no reason. You don't need a truck.
You don't need this stuff. It's not even like being an apprentice auto mechanic. You don't need to acquire $50,000 of tools and a big snap-on box to bring around with you from every shop you work at.
In welding, most of the jobs are gonna require you to bring your PPE, so like welding jackets and gloves and your welding shield and boots. That's really all that we're gonna require are some basic hand tools. I've worked for companies where they provided everything except for boots.
I mean a welding shield, everything. And I've also worked for other companies where we had to bring our own lockout locks and some basic hand tools if you wanted them. But you could go sign out the other tools. So yeah, realistically you don't need to go out and buy, you don't even need a welding machine.
I mean I have some, but... I do welding outside of my job. I do side jobs and stuff So that's why I have this equipment and for personal use you don't need a you don't even need a welding machine or any of That you really don't need much to be a welder I know guys that have I mean guys that are superintendents and make three hundred thousand dollars a year They do not have a welding machine at home.
They don't even put their shield on anymore because they don't really well they're more of a supervisor on welding jobs and These guys don't weld at home, don't talk about welding after work. That is their job. We're a welder, now they're the supervisor.
They've never bought any fancy equipment in their entire life. The only time they're buying equipment is through a company credit card for a job. So you do not need to spend a bunch of money on tooling to be a welder. Okay, so another con would be the traveling for work.
I know probably guys between the ages of 18 and 25 see that as a positive that you get to travel for work. But it's not how a lot of people think. When you travel for welding, it's usually, it's not always like this, but it's usually two scenarios.
One of two. You're either A. Jumping around every week somewhere new and going and welding on a bunch of different projects all over the place and you get your weekends off or a couple days off before you go out for another 12 days or a week or whatever.
So it's a lot of traveling but you're going home for short bursts all the time or B you're going long-term jobs away from home for months at a time and you're staying there and you don't get to go home like on the weekends or stuff like that. So those are the two scenarios. It's not like being in advertising and you got to go to a trade show in Vegas for, you know, four days. It's not like that.
It's like they're building a new plant. They need welders there on a certain part for four months. You pick up the phone, you hear about the job, you say yes, you got to go find a place to stay or they provide you a camp room or you got to get a hotel or something and you stay, you know, close to the site.
for four months and you work for those four months and that's where you work that's the traveling and why that's a con is because any veteran guy will tell you it sucks you don't want to be away from home making all this money who cares how much money you make if you're never home and you never get to spend it if you work and you go some of these guys are making insane money don't have lives they make crazy money you know but they don't have anything some guys don't even have houses they just spend it on drugs and stuff Who knows? Not all of them, but it happens. So you got to really find your work-life balance and how much you want to travel and see if you can, you know, figure out how to travel sometimes, but not all the time. You really got to look into it because the traveling eventually, once you get settled, you have a house, a girlfriend or kids and stuff like that, or even toys. If you have a boat, jet skis, snowmobiles, stuff like that, you want to use them and you need the time off.
You need to be home to use them. So traveling keeps you away from your actual life. And also with traveling, the way you work is it can really affect your health with drugs and alcohol. And I'll get into that in another example.
But yeah, traveling 100% can definitely be a huge con of working as a welder. Okay, another pro is you get to work on super cool stuff. So when you get into the industry, if you're going to chase big dollar jobs, a lot of it could be in pipe welding, which I mean, you'll get to. See some cool stuff you'll get to go work in the mountains if you're on pipelines and stuff like that if you space If you if you go out and you search for more of the specialty stuff That's not just welding pipe out in the desert or whatever.
You could get into all kinds of nuclear power plants regular Coal power plants stuff like that. You can get into Production plants for all these different things so you work in an acid plant you could work in autoclaves bunch of cool stuff You get to see this equipment. I mean I've stood right on the face of a nuclear reactor before It's really not that cool, but it I mean it sounds cool It's cool when you see the whole thing But yeah, you get to work on a lot of unique equipment You could be out there working on giant d10 bulldozers and triple seven cat dump trucks and stuff like that Or you could be working on and big antenna towers for a cell phone company welding brackets up there You could be way out in Alaska working in gold mines. There's all kinds, you get to work on super cool equipment and it's all kinds of different things all the time.
You know, hydro dams, you get to see the insides of what a hydro dam and how it's assembled. And you get some really cool pictures of you working on this stuff. Steel mills, you get to work right next to giant pots of lava.
It's just really unique and interesting equipment that you have the potential to be able to work on. Which to me is a big pro because it keeps the job interesting and you learn a lot outside of just what your job is. You actually get to learn what the things you're working on do and how just general things that we take for granted every day are processed and made into the things we use.
Okay, so another con is health. With welding, it's a dangerous job in a few ways. There's the physical danger of you're working with cranes a lot sometimes and stuff. So they could drop an I-beam on you and squish you. squish your arm, squish your leg, squish your whole body and kill you.
There's also the idea behind shifting pieces into place and stored energy and crushing your fingers, your hand, your shoulder, your leg, your head again, killing you. There's running a grinder in a shop. You could just be working in a fab shop.
Grinder gets caught on something or whatever and it flies out of your hands in your thigh, cuts your thigh open. You can't walk for a few months because you cut an artery in your thigh. There's...
You're using a hammer to bang some wedges in and fit a piece of plate on a storage tank and one of the wedges pops off and hits you in the face and takes out your eye. There's a bunch of physical hazards. Working at heights, you could fall to your death.
You could be in an EWP, elevated work platform, and tip the thing over, die. There's so many ways to die with physicalities of it. But there's also the long-term things that won't kill you right now, but they'll kill you later. And that is the dust and inhalation of fumes and all the different chemicals and stuff that you will come across in your career that store up in your body and kill you over time.
There's a lot of welders that die younger than they should have because they weren't wearing respirators and they worked in very harsh environments. So not just the physical things that are bad for your health, also just the general... Environment you're working in and the materials are working with what are they gonna do to your body?
What are they gonna do when your skin absorbs the grinding dust and stuff like that? It goes over time and that is something that they don't really Job job sites are super safe in oil and gas industry and stuff like that But the long-term effects of those things they don't really know and they don't want to know also another health hazard would be working with When you're traveling and working long hours and stuff like this, your health habits and diet and drug and alcohol problems, that could kill you faster than your job. So that's another whole other thing outside of just the work that it comes as a health hazard if you're a welder.
Okay, so another pro of being a welder is you can basically live anywhere in the world. Anywhere that humans live, there's infrastructure. Anywhere there's infrastructure, there's going to be metal. Anywhere there's metal, there's going to be welders. So anywhere in the world that's populated, there's going to be jobs for welders.
Now, that doesn't mean you're going to make a ton of money. It depends where you live or where you're willing to work is where you're going to make this big money. So if you live in Florida, there's not a whole bunch of heavy duty, heavy industry in Florida. I mean, there's tons of welding work and stuff, but not like Texas where they have oil or Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, where they have another big oil industry there. It's not like that where there's a ton of work.
So it depends. Depends where you live, kind of, or where you're willing to work is, you know, how much money you can make. But anywhere you go, you're basically going to have employment.
Okay, so another con that people don't, maybe don't really know or don't think about is hours of work. If you're a welder, there's a lot of overtime because it's a time-consuming process. Welding things together takes a lot of effort and time and it's hard to judge how long things are going to take because it's not just bolted up connections.
There's a lot of things that can go wrong so there's a lot of overtime and because of the overtime that stretches your day out. So get used to working 10-hour days. A lot of but. Fab shops are going to four days a week, 10 hours a day.
That's my favorite shift. If I'm going to be working 40 hours a week, I want to be doing four days, 10 hours a day. That's easy. That's nothing.
If that sounds like a lot to you, wake up because it's going to be that. nothing so you go from 40 hours a week to like 84 hours a week working 12 so you don't always have 40 hour weeks if you want to make a lot of money as a welder you're gonna have to work a lot of overtime you're gonna have to work more overtime hours in a week than regular hours so that really is a stressful on your body and it just takes up a lot of your personal time so again you got to know how to judge you got to know how to save your money how to move your money around and still live your life and have a job at the same time. So that's the thing with welding. If you just want to work 40 hours a week, 15 minutes from your house at a fab shop, go ahead.
You're really not going to make that big of money. But if you want to make a ton of money, get ready to sacrifice a lot of your personal life. So you might be happier just working the 40 hours at a fab shop.
Who knows? Just don't expect to be making over $100,000 a year. you can make the hundred thousand dollars a year but you're gonna spend a lot more of that year on site at work so you gotta kind of pick and choose it you can't have both so you gotta figure it out so that's a con to make the big money you gotta work a lot of hours and it's the overtime that pays okay so last pro would be that You're always in demand as a welder unless everything's shut down.
For example, like in 2008, the recession, unless everything is completely shut down, dead stop, they're going to need welders. So you're always going to be in demand as a welder. And guys that say they can't find a job, you're not looking hard enough or they don't want to get a job. You can travel, you may have to go outside of where you live, but there are tons of jobs everywhere.
So you're always in demand and from the beginning of your career to the end you can basically guarantee yourself you're going to have employment from that start time to your finish time. You may have to travel, you may have to go out of your way to find a job, but there's always going to be work. And that's a huge, I mean, any career now, that's a very good thing to know. So that's a big pro with welding is you don't really have to be worried about running out of work.
You may have to go chase it sometimes, but it's always, in most cases, there's always going to be opportunities for employment. Okay, the last con is testing. Now, if you... for example work in a production shop building excavator buckets and you weld dual shield flux core flat horizontal you're probably only going to need one ticket like a well you're going to need to do like two tests that might just make you do a horizontal coupon every two years to keep your certification because that's all you need and what these certifications are is basically it's a mock-up of what you're going to be welding and it's a it's a miniature version of what you're going to be doing You weld it out and they test it to see if you're capable of performing the welds.
Now these tests. In some scenarios with a lot of shutdown and higher end alloys and high money applications where you're potentially going to make a ton of money, you're going to need to do these tests. I mean I did a nuclear job. I had to do five tests in eight hours to get the job. That's a lot of testing.
And I don't think there's any other job in the world that requires this much testing before you actually get to go and work so it's Really intense the testing and that's a con because if they're doing a pipe job and they need pipe fitters They'll just call the pipe fitter and be hey you want to come out to wherever for this long amount of time for this job The pipe fitter says yes, he's hired now when they call the welders for the same job. They're gonna call the welder and say hey Do you want to come out and do this weld test for this job? They didn't give them the job yet.
They gave them an opportunity to test for the job. So that's an extra step between you and your paycheck is this welding test. And if you fail, you probably don't get the job. So that is obviously a con that just makes your life harder. So testing, sometimes you're going to be doing, some guys I bet, do 100 tests a year on all the different jobs and different applications they have to do in a year because of all the way the engineering is. and the way things are built they might have to do 100 weld tests in a year that is nuts and i've seen guys do like more than five tests in one day it's a lot and it's in gets in your way of your paycheck but it's kind of required for you to do to make big money so testing well testing is a big con to me it's you know kind of it makes getting your paycheck harder It's just how it is though.
You got to suck it up and get good at taking doing these weld tests and expect to fail a couple because it's just if you want to make the money, you got to pass the test. Okay, so that's the end of the video. If you have any other pros and cons, throw them down in the comments. This isn't the 10 pros and cons of welding. This is 10 pros and cons of welding.
Obviously, I didn't cover everything. There's a ton more. If anyone wants to throw them in the comments, go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for watching and hopefully I'll have more content out soon.