READOS / Manufacturing / KEVOS® original book
Welder Training by the Numbers
Planning, costing and measuring welder training: learning curves, practice cost, test coupons, qualification odds, skill decay and payback
Train welders with numbers: how skill grows with practice, what an hour of practice costs, how to assess and qualify fairly, how skill fades, and when training pays back.
Start readingAbout this book
Every fabrication business depends on welders, and most find them hard to hire. The usual answer is to train them: take on apprentices, retrain people from other trades, or move existing welders onto new processes and positions. Training is expensive in time, materials and supervision, and its results are uncertain, so it is often done informally, by putting a new person beside an experienced one and hoping. This book is about doing it deliberately, with numbers.
It is for fabrication managers, welding supervisors, trainers and training coordinators. It assumes basic algebra and a working knowledge of welding. It explains how welding skill grows with practice, how to describe that growth with a learning curve, what an hour of practice costs, how to assess trainees and estimate their chances in a qualification test, how skill fades without use, and how to work out whether a training programme pays for itself.
Early manuals as a starting point
In 1917 and 1918, the United States Army needed thousands of welders for the repair of vehicles, guns and equipment and found almost none available. It set up its own welding schools, and in 1919 the officer in charge of welding instruction for the Ordnance Department, Lorn Campbell Jr., published an Oxy-Acetylene Welding Manual written for the instructor as well as the student. He complained that the many new welding classes each taught in a different way, argued for a standard method, and insisted that welding could not be learned by watching but only by practice at the torch. In the same year, the Davis-Bournonville company published the lecture course of its welding institute, which set out the theory a welder needed and stressed that the course must develop manual skill until the welder held the torch correctly without thinking about it.
Their problems were the same as a modern fabricator’s: too few welders, too little time, and training that varied with whoever gave it. Each chapter takes up one of their themes and puts numbers on it.
The running case
This is an illustration. A structural steel fabricator with twenty-two staff makes portal frames, platforms and stairs, welding mainly with flux-cored and solid-wire processes in the shop and manual metal arc on site. It cannot hire enough qualified welders, so it has taken on four trainees: two apprentices, a boilermaker’s labourer moving up, and a career changer from the automotive trade. The workshop manager wants to plan their training, cost it, measure their progress and know when each will be ready to weld production work.
The fabricator, its people, costs and results are invented for teaching. They are not KEVOS® work. Real training must meet the applicable qualification standards, apprenticeship arrangements and work health and safety requirements.
How to use the book
Chapter 1 sets out why training pays and what it must achieve. Chapters 2 and 3 cover how skill is learned and the learning curve. Chapter 4 plans a course, and Chapter 5 costs practice. Chapter 6 deals with assessment and feedback, and Chapter 7 with qualification tests and their odds. Chapter 8 covers skill decay and refreshers, Chapter 9 safety training, and Chapter 10 the economics and the training record. Every chapter ends with an exercise and its worked answer.
Limits and professional responsibility
This book is educational. Welder qualification for structural, pressure and other regulated work must follow the applicable standards and specifications, such as AS/NZS 2980 and ISO 9606-1 for the qualification of welders of steels, and be witnessed and recorded as they require. Apprenticeships and nationally recognised qualifications follow their own training packages and rules. Training must comply with the work health and safety regulator’s requirements, including Safe Work Australia’s model code of practice for welding processes as adopted in each jurisdiction. The learning curves and costs in this book are illustrations; each business must measure its own.
An original treatment
READOS covers workforce capability in general in Building workforce capability in manufacturing, and why training fades in The forgetting curve and why training fades. This book applies those ideas to welding, with the numbers a welding supervisor needs. The explanations, the fabricator’s case, the calculations, figures and exercises are original KEVOS® writing. The historical manuals are public-domain works in the United States; their ideas are summarised in new words, and none of their text, tables or illustrations is reproduced.
Who this book is for
Fabrication managers, welding supervisors, trainers and training coordinators who take on new welders or upskill existing ones and need to plan, cost and measure the training.
What you will learn
- Describe how welding skill is acquired and why practice with feedback matters more than instruction alone.
- Use a learning curve to forecast a trainee's speed and reject rate, and to set realistic targets.
- Cost an hour of welding practice and a whole training programme.
- Design assessments and qualification tests, and estimate pass probabilities.
- Plan refresher practice against skill decay, and calculate the payback of training.
Inside this book
Chapters
- 01Why train welders, and what training must achieveWeigh hiring, training and subcontracting welders, define in observable terms what a trained welder must do, and put a number on what poor welding costs a fabricator in rework.
- 02How welding skill is learnedFollow a trainee from conscious effort to automatic skill, count the repetitions an hour of practice gives, and see why feedback, spacing and variety decide how fast welding skill grows.
- 03The learning curveDescribe a trainee's improving speed and falling reject rate with a learning curve, fit one from two points, forecast the practice hours to a target, and allow for noise and plateaus.
- 04Planning a coursePlan a welder's first year as a sequence of modules with practice hours, balance theory against shop practice, check booth and instructor capacity, and fold supervised production work into training.
- 05The cost of practiceBuild the cost of an hour of welding practice from wages, instruction, plate, wire, gas, power and the booth, cost a trainee's first year, and find the savings that do not slow learning.
- 06Assessment and feedbackAssess practice welds by eye, gauge and break test, judge what a small sample of coupons can prove, check that two assessors agree, and give feedback that changes the next weld.
- 07Qualification and its oddsSee what a welder qualification test proves, calculate a trainee's chance of passing from their reject rate, decide when to sit the test, and cost a qualification including retests.
- 08Skill decay and refreshersModel how a welder's reject rate creeps up in a position or process they have stopped using, track the gaps in a welder register, and decide when a refresher costs less than the repairs it prevents.
- 09Safety training for new weldersTeach welding hazards before the first arc, build safe habits into practice, set the supervision new welders need, and protect trainees and others from fume, light, shock, heat and fire.
- 10Training economics and the training recordCompare training a welder with hiring one over five years, allow for trainees who leave, keep the training record that proves what was done, and review what the fabricator's first year achieved.
References and source notes
The manuscript and worked examples are original KEVOS® writing. References inform particular concepts; their authors do not endorse this book. Web references were consulted on 25 October 2026.
- Lorn Campbell Jr., Officer in Charge of Welding Instruction, Ordnance Department, US Army (John Wiley & Sons, New York). Oxy-Acetylene Welding Manual (1919). Historical source for the US Army's welding schools, the shortage of trained operators, the need for a standard method of instruction, the limits on how fast students can absorb lectures, the primacy of shop practice and the beginner's simplified technique. Summarised in new words; no text, tables or illustrations are reproduced.
- Davis-Bournonville Company, Davis-Bournonville Institute, Jersey City. Davis-Bournonville Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting Course of Instruction (1919). Historical source for the structure of a commercial welding course, its lecture subjects and its emphasis on developing manual skill until the welder holds the torch correctly without conscious effort. Summarised in new words.
- T. P. Wright, Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences. Factors affecting the cost of airplanes (1936). The original statement of the learning curve, in which unit cost falls by a constant percentage each time cumulative output doubles, used in Chapters 2 and 3. Cited as the source of the idea; the curves in this book are illustrations.
- Safe Work Australia. Model Code of Practice: Welding processes (current edition). Named in Chapter 9 as the model code for the hazards of welding processes, including the information, training, instruction and supervision of workers. Check which version applies in your jurisdiction.
- Standards Australia; International Organization for Standardization. AS/NZS 2980 and ISO 9606-1, qualification of welders for fusion welding of steels (current editions). Named in Chapter 7 by number and scope. No content or values from these standards are reproduced; the application standard and contract specify which applies.
