In recent decades, welding—like other blue-collar trades that once provided high-school graduates with a reliable route to the middle class—seemed to have about as promising a future as rotary phones.
But as The New York Times reports, many of these once-faltering occupations are finding new life in Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere in the Gulf Coast region, where an industrial revival built around the energy boom continues to spawn petrochemical plants and miles of new pipeline despite the plunge in crude oil prices.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Jim Hanna, a 33-year industry veteran who is now senior director of human resources at Irving, Texas-based Fluor Corporation, an engineering and construction company with offices in Baton Rouge that is building petrochemical plants in the area for Dow Chemical, Chevron Phillips Chemical and Sasol. “For a long time, parents didn’t want their son or daughter to become a pipefitter or welder, but now, the demand for non-college graduates with vocational skills is huge.”
The insistent hunger for welders along the Gulf Coast has created an unusually close partnership between the energy industry and local community colleges to train people for disappearing skills.
Fluor and other construction-related companies regularly contribute money, advice and castoff equipment. ExxonMobil, for example, has pledged $1 million to a consortium of nine community colleges that offers training in the petrochemical field to recruit students and faculty.
President Obama has proposed expanding this sort of alliance between schools and industry in his latest budget. It is an element of a larger plan to use community colleges to prepare greater numbers of young people for the 21st-century workforce and promote long-term economic growth.
“We’ve got a big gap,” says Jennifer Taylor, a training coordinator at Fluor. “The old ones are retiring and the new ones are just coming up.”
Through most of the 1980s, the number of welders nationwide topped 550,000. By 2013, there were just 343,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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