How to become a welder in Australia

There are four realistic ways in, they suit different circumstances, and only one of them is an apprenticeship. This page sets out all four honestly, including what each one costs you in time and what it leaves you holding at the end.

The four routes in

1. An apprenticeship

The standard route and still the best one if you can get it. You are employed and paid from day one, you learn on real work, and your formal training is delivered alongside it by a training provider. You finish with a trade qualification and about four years of actual experience, which is the part employers are buying.

Typically three to four years, and increasingly competency based, which means it can finish sooner if you are demonstrably ready. How the apprenticeship works in detail.

Best for: school leavers, and anybody who can afford apprentice wages for the first couple of years.

2. An adult apprenticeship or traineeship

The same qualification, entered as a mature age worker. Adult apprentices are usually paid at a higher rate than a first year school leaver, because the award recognises adult status, and existing workers can often have prior experience recognised so the training takes less time.

If you are already employed somewhere with a workshop, the conversation to have is with your employer rather than with a college. Employers can convert an existing worker into an apprenticeship arrangement, and there are support networks that handle the paperwork.

Best for: career changers, labourers and trade assistants already in a workshop.

3. Pre-apprenticeship and short courses

A pre-apprenticeship, typically a Certificate II level engineering pathways qualification, gives you basic hand skills, safety and workshop competence. It is not a trade qualification and it does not make you a welder. What it does do is make you employable as an apprentice, which is the actual bottleneck for most people starting out.

Short welding courses are worth being clear eyed about. A weekend or a week of MIG welding will teach you to lay a bead. It will not qualify you for anything, and the certificate of attendance is not a welding ticket. That is fine if the purpose is to find out whether you like the work or to weld on your own projects. It is not fine if somebody has sold it to you as a route into the trade.

Best for: testing whether the trade suits you, and making yourself a more attractive apprentice.

4. On the tools first, qualification later

Plenty of working welders learned in a workshop without ever being formally apprenticed, particularly in rural areas, farm and repair work, and small fabrication shops. The skill is real and the paperwork is missing, which becomes a problem the first time you want to work on a site with a quality system.

The fix is skills recognition. An assessment against the units of the trade qualification establishes what you can already do, and you only train and get assessed on the gaps. It is usually faster and cheaper than people expect, and it converts years of undocumented work into something you can produce.

Best for: experienced welders with no formal qualification.

Qualification codes and titles change between training package releases, so check the current ones on the national register at training.gov.au rather than trusting a code on a website, and ask the training provider to confirm the code they are delivering. For apprenticeship support, see australianapprenticeships.gov.au.

What a welding ticket actually is

This is the thing most often misunderstood by people entering the trade, and it costs them money.

A trade qualification says you completed training. A welder certificate, what everyone calls a welding ticket, says you sat an examination in a specific welding process, on a specific material, in a specific configuration and position, and passed. In Australia these are usually issued against AS 1796, and they are numbered by category so that an employer can read from the certificate exactly what you are qualified to weld.

Three consequences worth understanding before you spend money on one:

• A ticket is narrow on purpose. A certificate covering manual metal arc welding on alloy steel pipe says nothing about your gas tungsten arc welding on stainless. That is not bureaucracy. It is the reason the certificate is worth anything.
• A ticket expires. Certification is time limited and requires evidence of continued work to stay current. A lapsed certificate shows on the register as lapsed. How renewal works.
• A ticket is checkable. Every AWI certificate goes on a register that an employer can check with the number and your surname. That is what makes it worth more than a printed piece of paper. How the register works.

You do not need a ticket to be employed as a welder. You need one to work on the jobs where a specification says welders shall be certified, and those are usually the better paid jobs. Getting AS 1796 certified.

Which processes to learn first

New welders often ask which process to specialise in. The honest answer is that the sequence matters more than the choice.

• Manual metal arc teaches you to read a weld pool with nothing helping you. It is unforgiving, and welders who learn it first tend to pick up everything else quickly.
• Gas metal arc and flux cored are where the production work is. High deposition, and the processes most fabrication shops run all day.
• Gas tungsten arc is the precision process: thin material, stainless, pipe root runs, and anything where the weld will be visible or radiographed.
• Positional pipe welding is where the money is, in any process. Welding a fixed pipe joint all the way round, to a standard that survives radiography, is a genuinely scarce skill.

If you want one piece of career advice: get good at pipe. Plate work is plentiful and so are plate welders.

What it pays, and what to check

AWI does not publish wage figures, because they vary by state, by industry, by shift arrangement and by whether the work is on site or in a shop, and a number on a web page goes stale immediately. What is worth knowing is where to look and what to ask.

• Apprentice and tradesperson minimum rates are set by the relevant modern award, and the award is published and free to read.
• Above the award, the two things that move pay most are your certificate range and whether you will travel. A welder with pressure pipe certification who will go to a shutdown is in a different market from a shop welder with none.
• Ask what the job requires before you ask what it pays. If a role needs certification you do not hold, the pay figure is not available to you yet.

Common questions

How long does it take to become a welder in Australia?

An apprenticeship is typically three to four years, and competency based completion can shorten that for people who progress quickly. A pre-apprenticeship course is usually a few months and does not qualify you as a tradesperson. Skills recognition for somebody already welding can be much faster because it only assesses the gaps. Certification against AS 1796 sits on top of all of these and takes a theory unit plus a minimum of 40 hours of practical training per certificate category.

Do I need a licence to weld in Australia?

No. Welding is not a licensed occupation in Australia in the way electrical work or plumbing is. What you need is the qualification your employer requires and, for a lot of higher value work, certification against a standard such as AS 1796 because the specification demands it. Separate regulatory requirements can apply to the work around welding, such as high risk work licensing and permits, and those are about the activity rather than the welding itself.

What is the difference between a welding ticket and a Certificate III?

A Certificate III is a vocational qualification from a training provider and it says you were trained across a broad trade. A welding ticket is a certificate against a standard, usually AS 1796, and it says you were examined in one specific process, material, configuration and position and passed. Employers on quality controlled work ask for the ticket, because it is narrow, examined and verifiable.

Can I get a welding job with no experience?

As an apprentice or a trade assistant, yes, and that is the normal way in. As a welder, generally no, because a fabricator carrying quality obligations cannot put an unqualified person on load bearing or pressure work. Getting a pre-apprenticeship qualification and showing up with basic hand skills and a safety induction is the practical way to shorten the wait.

Is welding a good trade to get into?

It is if you like the work, and it rewards specialisation more than most trades. Welding underpins mining, energy, defence, rail, water, agriculture and construction, and the certified end of it is persistently short of people. It is also physically demanding, the fumes and the noise are real occupational hazards that have to be managed properly, and the difference in pay between a general welder and a certified pipe welder is large. Treat the certification as the career, not the trade ticket.

Which welding course should I do?

Start from the outcome. If you want a trade, do the apprenticeship or the trade qualification with skills recognition. If you want to test the water, a short course is fine as long as nobody has told you it qualifies you. If you already have the trade and want the better paid work, do certification against AS 1796 in the category the work you want actually uses, which means finding out what that work specifies before you enrol.