About the Australian Welding Institute

What AWI does

Three things, and they hold together.

We certify people. Welders and welding supervisors, against Australian Standards, through training and examination delivered by training providers. AWI assesses the qualification and issues the certificate. The certification schemes are here.

We keep the register. Every certificate AWI issues is entered on a register, and the register is what an employer checks. Not the paper, not a PDF, not a phone call. Checking takes a certificate number and a surname.

We publish what we know. The standards library explains what the Australian welding standards actually require, free and without a login. The technical library goes deeper into process, defects and testing. A body that certifies competence has an obligation to explain the thing it is certifying against.

How AWI works with the training system

AWI does not deliver training. That is deliberate. A body cannot credibly certify the output of its own courses, so the two jobs are kept apart.

Training and examination sit with TAFE institutes and training providers, working from units in the national training packages. AWI’s role is to define what the scheme requires, endorse the qualification when the evidence is complete, issue the certificate, and audit that the process held.

The commitments AWI has published on its own behalf, in its own words:

• work with training organisations to develop, maintain and review the qualification and certification system
• issue certificates within four weeks of receiving results, provided the candidate has supplied all relevant information and paid the registration fee
• maintain a national register of successful candidates
• maintain an audit role to verify the integrity of the process and the system
• take part in an examination development group and contribute to it
• help develop examinations for industry where industry asks for them

The four week issue commitment is the one worth holding us to. The application process sets out what “all relevant information” means, so the clock is not stopped by a missing form.

Who AWI is for

Members are welders, welding supervisors, welding inspectors, welding engineers, fabricators, training providers and equipment and consumable suppliers. The common thread is that welding is load bearing in their work, either literally or commercially.

AWI acts to support members in their business rather than to encroach on it. In practice that means AWI does not compete with member fabricators for fabrication work, and does not compete with member training providers for training delivery.

What membership includes and what it costs.

What AWI will not do

Some of these are worth stating plainly because the absence of them is what damages trust in certification.

• We do not publish member personal details. No public directory of members. No dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers or employers on the public website. The register of certified people is opt in and carries credential information only.
• We do not gate the standards library. Explaining what a standard requires is not a member benefit. It is the job.
• We do not treat a printed certificate as proof. Printed and PDF certificates are easy to alter. The register is the record, and we say so on the certificate itself.
• We publish withdrawals. Certificates AWI has withdrawn or suspended, and false claims to AWI certification that AWI has established, are published.

Where AWI came from

In 2010, every state chairman of the Welding Technology Institute of Australia resigned.

Not one of them over a disagreement. Not a couple in a bad year. All of them.

The founders’ account of why is straightforward. The national body had set its course on rolling out the International Institute of Welding qualification framework and was pushing it hard, with little regard for the training providers already delivering welder training in each state. Then it began competing with those same training providers for the work. The people who had spent years building training capability in their own states found the national body running against them.

Somewhere in that, the trade stopped being the point.

Three of those chairmen, from Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales, decided that arguing about the direction was not going to change it. They started again, and formed the Australian Welding Institute in Adelaide that same year.

The Institute is Australian Welding Institute Ltd, an Australian public company, ABN 23 143 030 899, active since 15 June 2010. It has operated continuously since.

What has not changed since

AWI was founded by people who came up through the trade, and that is still the difference between this Institute and the others.

Most bodies look at welding from the top down. From the engineer’s desk, or from a lecture theatre. Both of those matter, and AWI works with both. Neither of them is where the weld gets made.

AWI starts at the other end, and it shows up in four ways:

• Competence, not paperwork. A certificate says somebody passed a test on a given day. It does not say they can do the job in front of them tomorrow, in that position, on that material, to that acceptance criteria. AWI certification is built to say something about capability, and the register exists so an employer can check it rather than take a printed page on trust.
• Practical application over theory for its own sake. The theory has to be there, and AWI examines it properly. But it is taught and tested because it changes what somebody does at the machine, not because it fills a syllabus.
• Understanding that comes from having done it. The people who set and assess AWI’s schemes have run procedures, qualified welders, read radiographs and stood in front of work that was rejected. That is not a credential. It is the reason a finding lands as useful instead of as a lecture.
• Empathy for the person doing the work. Welding is hard, hot, and unforgiving of a bad day, and most of the people doing it are trying to get it right. An institute that forgets that ends up measuring paperwork and calling it quality.

The last one is worth saying plainly, because it is the one that gets left out of mission statements. Telling a welder their weld is non-compliant and walking off is easy. Telling them which variable moved, why it moved, and what to change on the next run is the job. One of those improves the weld. The other just records that it was wrong.

None of that is nostalgia for the tools. It is the reason AWI writes what it writes, certifies the way it certifies, and publishes a register instead of a certificate. The range on a procedure sheet does not weld anything. The person holding the torch does.