How quickly can you learn welding?

The basics of MIG/MAG welding can be picked up fairly quickly. Since “learning to weld” is quite a flexible concept and means different things to different people, let’s define it in this article as follows:

• Knowing how to use and adjust a MIG/MAG welding machine and accessories
• Knowing how to tack weld
• Being able to weld light steel structures
• Having control over a few different welding positions and situations
• Weld appearance may vary quite a lot

With this definition, I dare to suggest some approximate learning times for the basics: oppimiselle suuntaa antavat tuntimäärät:

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You’d like to learn welding but wonder how much time you should set aside for picking up this new skill? First, let’s make a clear distinction between two different things. One is simply the skill of welding where pieces of steel are successfully joined so that the joints are strong and reasonably neat in appearance. The other, and a completely different matter, is the profession of a welder —learning that takes a much longer journey and involves far more than just joining pieces together.

In this article, we’ll focus on the first: the skill of welding itself, not the welding profession.

Example: Matt Learns to Weld

Let’s start with a real-life example. Matt is a 46-year-old young man from England. He had zero hands-on experience with metalwork, but plenty of experience in all sorts of other things. By profession, he is an arborist—a master of climbing trees and handling a chainsaw. He’s also a hunter, a hiker, has worked on a farm, as a forest caretaker, and even taught all these skills to others. On top of that, his hobbies include fishing, photography, cooking, and countless other pursuits. In short, he’s an endlessly curious jack-of-all-trades, always with new projects on the go. And now, he wanted to learn welding.

At the course – Zero hours of practice behind

Matt came to my welding course with no prior experience. His first welds of the day were exactly what you’d expect—rather rough-looking metal diarrhea. That’s completely normal; after all, no one learns to walk either with their very first step. As the day went on, he started to get the hang of it, and by the end of the course day Matt was able to join pieces together successfully. The machines and tools stayed well under control. There was still some fumbling, and a few mistakes kept repeating persistently. But that too is normal and disappears with practice. At this point, he had about 6 hours of pure welding practice behind him.

Welding after the course

A few weeks after the course, Matt got the chance to weld and put his new skills to use within his day job. At his workplace, there were steel tube frames for milling guards where some of the joints had broken loose. A perfect practice project—since their only task was simply to stay upright. What made it tricky was the shape: round tubes joined at 90-degree angles.

After two hours, Matt had finished his first guard. Some of the welds turned out better, some worse. Again normal when learning anything new—sometimes you get correct, sometimes you don’t. The end result was any functional. The round tube shape forced him to think more carefully about how to control the welding gun compared to just making a straight welds—making this a challenging but educational welding job.

Up to this point, Matt had only about 6 hours of practice from the course. Now he got 2 more hours. His own comment on that afternoon’s training session was: “Cool to actually make something with a real purpose. Gives an instant boost in motivation. Sure, it’s not very pretty, but it works.”

A week later came the next chance to practice. This time, Matt got to weld a wall mount for a lightweight item at his workplace. Once again, a perfect practice project—something with a real purpose, but not critical in its performance requirements.

A couple of hours of tinkering, and the rack was done. This time, the result surprised Matt—it turned out unexpectedly good. The rack was meant to hold a couple of kilos, but you could easily place 200 kg on Matt’s version without worrying about the welds failing.

At this point, Matt had about ten hours of welding experience in total—the course plus two afternoon practice sessions.

How to go on with practicing from here?

At this point, Matt had welded for only ten hours—which is still very little, no matter what new skill you’re learning. Yet he had already had some success and was able to independently make things by welding.

A sensible way for Matt to progress from here is by continuously working on small welding projects. Each project brings new situations—new learning and experience. And most importantly—repetition. The projects can be anything: making shelves or brackets for his own workshop, repairing broken steel parts, creating home décor pieces, building a tool, fixing a work machine…the list goes on endlessly. Some projects will turn out great—others, not so much. But with each one, experience grows and mistakes become fewer.

When those 10 hours turn into 50, the way of working is already on a completely different level. And when 50 hours turn into 100, you’re in a whole new league.

Hot tip for practicing:
In the early stages, everyone learning to weld quickly develops their own favorite techniques and habits—that is, the way that feels natural and works best for them. I’m mainly talking about travel direction—pulling vs. pushing—and different welding positions, like moving left to right vs. top to bottom. At the very beginning, I always encourage using the technique that that feels most natural to you —not the one that’s “technically correct according to the book.”

There’s a clear reason for this: you need the feeling of successes.When you succeed, your motivation to practice stays high. And when you’re motivated, practice becomes something you actually want to do. If every attempt feels like a struggle, you’ll quickly lose interest in practicing altogether.

Some people may disagree with this approach—and that’s fine. You can always write your own article on the topic from a different perspective.

People learn welding at different paces

During my courses, I get to meet people of all ages and backgrounds. The pace of learning varies enormously. For some, grasping new things is more challenging—certain mistakes keep repeating despite corrections, and learning new body movements takes time.

For others, the learning process seems astonishingly fast. These people absorb everything told to them right away and for example immediately adopt corrected posture without reverting to the old wrong one. I call them prodigies because of this almost uncanny learning ability.

Most people, however, fall somewhere in between—like Matt in the earlier example. A typical average learner will keep repeating a particular mistake throughout the day, but by the end of the course, that habit usually starts to fade. Often, by the day’s end, students can already recognize when they’re making that same mistake and know how to correct it on their own. From that point on, it’s just a matter of repetition until the correct technique starts to settle into muscle memory.

A common comment I hear from students at the end of the course is: “Now I feel confident enough to start welding on my own.”. And indeed—they can, and should. The sooner, the better. I’d argue that for most people, 3–5 afternoons of practice after a welding course are enough to achieve fairly good results.

An example of a fast learner

The fastest progress I’ve ever seen on a course came from a man around 35 years old who arrived with absolutely zero experience. He was a professional furniture carpenter—installing kitchen cabinets and similar fittings for a living. His passion, he said, was billiards. By midday, I noticed remarkable improvement in his work and asked him about it. He explained that handling steel pieces “feels pretty much the same as working with wood—just a different material” and about controlling the welding gun, he said “It feels quite natural, not much different from handling a pool cue.”The photo at the beginning of this article shows a piece he welded with only six hours of experience -a result that still amazes me.

How quickly can you learn welding?

Here’s the answer to the question posed at the beginning: how quickly can you learn welding? To be honest, any such table is rather vague. Even the phrase “learn to weld” is a flexible concept that means different things to different people. That’s why, for the purposes of this article, we’ll define it as follows:

• Knowing how to use and adjust the welding machine and accessories
• Knowing how to tack weld
• Being able to weld light steel structures
• Having control over a few different welding positions and situations
• Weld appearance may vary quite a lot

With these amounts of practice, you can roughly reach a solid grasp of the basics. And since welding, as a broader skill set, is truly vast —there’s no upper limit.

What can you actually do with the welding basics?
I often say that after completing the Hitsauskurssi.fi® Basic Course , the perfect follow-up project would be to build your own welding tablelike the ones used during the course. I believe that everyone who has taken the course can build such a table under guidance—and most could do it independently after 3–5 afternoons of practice, meaning about 6–10 hours. Of course, building the table requires a few additional practical skills besides welding itself—but many course participants already have those.

If you add two zeros to the practice hours mentioned earlier (depending on your learning ability, around 600–2400 hours), you can expect to be in the broader category of “good / very good,” where your skills already cover much more than just joining steel pieces together. Add one more zero to that, and you’ll rise to the level of a true-craftsman-demigod-specialist, where all limits disappear and nothing is impossible. Kind of like Neo breaking the Matrix code.

As already mentioned, the basics can be picked up quite quickly—some learn them in a day, others in a few. After that, you’ve gained a new, versatile practical skill, and it’s entirely up to you how far you want to take it. For some, the basics are more than enough—every now and then a project comes along where those fundamentals do the job perfectly. Others, however, want to keep developing their skills and dive deeper into the world of metalworking.

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Read more articles:

• Why is MIG/MAG welding best technique for beginners?
• Push or pull?
• Make your own welding table!

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