My name is Kevin Wood. I’m employed at Kramer Ltd. I’m a Welder by trade. Kramer is quite a growing company. It's a Caterpillar dealership. We’re involved in service, sales and rentals. There’s quite a variety of welding here. A good opportunity to learn.

[Decision To Enter This Occupation:]

I’ve been a Welder for seventeen years. I started out welding on my father's farm. My father was a Welder up to the age of twenty-nine until he started farming. That’s where I caught onto the idea of welding. From there I took a test. I was in a high school that involved different trades and I ended up falling into the welding category.

[Job Qualifications:]

I worked in a lot of Steel Fabrication shops for most of my welding career until I got a little tired of always getting laid off and hired back on. I wanted to find a better opportunity. I was looking for a particular type of work - different than Steel Fabrication - all the time. That’s when I fell into Maintenance Welding.

Before I did that, I had to upgrade my education to find a job - whether it be with Kramer or somewhere else. I wanted my Journeyman's ticket and Pressure ticket; that’s one thing that qualified me here.

[Type Of Education:]

You have to have worked a certain amount of hours to be able to take the Journeyman test. I believe the Board of Education can verify them [amount of hours]. After I had all the necessary hours, I went to the Board of Education (Train Branch) and ended up going on a seven-week course to Moose Jaw. That was where I received my Inter-provincial Journeyman's ticket.

[Skills Needed:]

You have to have a positive attitude in a workplace - any workplace I find. I think if you don’t have any kind of a positive attitude at all, it’s tough to hold on to a job.
Teamwork skills are very important. Most of our work done here at Kramer is done on a team effort. I don’t believe that too many companies or businesses out there don’t value a team effort nowadays.
I believe it is important to adapt to change in a workplace. Just for the reason that a lot of companies and businesses are upgrading more and more every day and it comes to the point that if you’re not upgrading yourself and going along with changes in a work place, you tend to fall behind. Just for instance, at Kramer here, we’re always changing our source of tooling, the machines we work on, the machines we work with, service reports, paper work and just a variety of changes you have to go through.
My typical day at work would be:

Punch my time card
Get dressed up for the day in coveralls
Open my tool box
Take out the tools that I need for a particular job
Get assigned to a job
Or, if I’m on a job for weeks on end, I go right to that job.
I may get called off a job and go on up to five, six, ten or twelve jobs in a day (at the most). I find that a lot of times it can be quite stressful to keep changing from job to job - but the priorities are there. So you’ve got to move and you’ve got to do it.

[Hours Of Work:]

Right now we are working twelve-hour days. So I would almost say a 9:00 am to 5:00 pm day would be quite rare in the welding industry now.

[Most Challenging Aspect:]

The most challenging part of my job would be just trying to keep ahead with the amount of welders we have here - trying to keep ahead with priority jobs would probably be the most challenging. Also, going on a day-to-day basis when we’re really busy here. It can be stressful from day-to-day but you’ve got to cope with it. You’ve got to go ahead and just move on to the next job.

[Most Satisfying Aspect:]

The most satisfying part of my job would be when I finish a job and stand back and look at it and say, "Hey, you know, I completed this job" and it's hopefully satisfactory and the customer likes what he's getting - and it's done on time.