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“You smell like welding,” Janesville Craig High School senior Natalie Forster joked with fellow Craig senior Alex Doane during a break in the competition. They were being judged in welding skills through SkillsUSA Wisconsin, a public-private workforce development partnership.

If Forster and Doane learn to embrace the prickly scent of freshly-fused metal— and the careers that come with it—they could soon also realize the smell of money.

According to a , the average annual pay for welders in industry-heavy Rock County is $52,359, about $5,300 more than the national average.

The study lists pay for welders in the Janesville-Beloit metro as ranking in the top 25 for all small U.S. cities.

More high school students

Nick Mauer, a welding instructor at Blackhawk Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Training Center in Milton, said he’s seeing more high school-aged students entering the tech college’s welding training program through dual-credit high school programs designed to give them a jumpstart on career skills.

Mauer said pay has been climbing for welders here in part because local manufacturers are still grappling with a worker shortage. This is as manufacturers continue to scramble to catch up on production and supply bottlenecks that came during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The manufacturing and production industry has for the last decade already been weathering a steady loss of experienced workers as Baby Boomers retire. It makes now an opportune time for students like Forster and Doane to give welding a serious look.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Beloit-Janesville metro area supports about 400 welders, accounting for just over 5% of all local production workers.

Mauer said it’s common now to see welders paid $23 to $25 an hour locally as companies compete with each other for a finite number of trained. That’s on par with average pay for drivers who work in heavy trucking, according to Bureau of Labor statistics.

Wage increases

“The supply and demand trend for welders is the big issue. There’s a lot of welding jobs compared to a small number of welders to fill those roles. We’ve seen wages increase pretty substantially since the pandemic,” Mauer said.

Janesville is only outranked on welder pay in Wisconsin by one other small city area, the Wausau metro area. The Construction Coverage study shows it holds a $1,000-a-year edge on Janesville-Beloit for welder pay.

Both metro areas have a higher proportion of production and manufacturing jobs compared to the national average. Janesville this year has had between 10,600 and 10,900 manufacturing jobs, a number that’s held steady since about 2019, federal labor data shows.

Greg Phillips, the dean of Blackhawk Tech’s training center, said right now, welders have their pick from a number of different segments in production. He said there are specialized welding jobs available locally now with companies that fabricate semitrailers, semitrailer tanks, farm implements, building enclosures and building steel.

He said labor statistics don’t count jobs in which welding may be one skill in a handful that workers need, and welding inspectors are uncounted.

“It’s a wide-open thing right now, but not enough people know it,” Phillips said. “It’s not like when you turn on the TV and everything’s a drama about police or firefighters or nurses and doctors. You obviously don’t see too many shows on TV about the life of a welding fabricator.”

No, you don’t. But Mauer said he’s seeing a growing number of younger people hopping aboard welding programs.

And he and his coworker, welding instructor David Rodden, said it’s more common now than in years past to see younger students come in during their free time for extra work on welding skills.

Mauer said the college’s timed, 30-minute welding competition offered students a taste of one of the big parts of life as a working welder: keeping up with the clock.

“Having to get work done on a time limit is like real life. It’s under the gun. It can be stressful, but I tell them (welding trainees) that it’s like anything else,” Mauer said. “You’ve got to take pride in what you do, take pride in your own level of craftsmanship, and you’ve got to be ambitious. You’ve got to want to come to work, and you’ve got to show up for work.”