shawn patterson

I am a certified pro welder. I do everything, or can at least, in my line of work we do very little stick but.... I worked as a welder for ten years before ever needing any credentials and by that time i had alot of experience. Over the coarse of a month me and another guy got all the necessary certs in .035, .045, and 1/16 mig and 4 different certs in tig. Theres a huge learning curve for someone going into school without any experience. We were actually automatically certified in blueprint reading and schematics because we had been functionally using those skills for so long. The one thing i would stress is not rushing into the first job offer. Find a clean and responsible company to work with.