atmosphere or work environment of an underwater welder is frequently hard, serious and hazardous. Like all other industries, an underwater welder must have skills and attitude appropriate for this kind of job. Also, advantages in this job are those with fine mechanical, hydraulic or electronic skills.
In addition, an underwater welder must have a good health, good swimming ability and the diver or welder must be comfortable in the water environment, have good stamina and must be physically fit, and the ability to work under stressful circumstances.
An underwater welder must have these attitudes:
Enthusiastic
Being in a mental state, and making decisions, is all about being enthusiastic. Being enthusiastic and energetic are attitudes that could make you ahead, without energy you could not get ahead. Being keen and enthusiastic could attract positive energies with a willingness to do the things to finish the job. The projects such as mending underwater structures or pipelines would be grueling, boring work. Discipline and work ethic are extremely important.
Can follow strict safety procedures
Underwater welding is a hazardous job where the danger is controlled to within very acceptable limits by a continuing assurance to strict safety procedures in every aspects of going underwater – maintenance, briefing, equipment selection, mobilisation, deployment underwater, and undertaking the job
itself.
Efficient
When an underwater welder have this attitude, being effective, produces the intended results, nevertheless, when being efficient, you can do the work with less time and effort. Meaning, with this attitude continuously striving, sooner or later you can go in advance in the career.
Ability to work both as part of a team and alone
A basic prerequisite to be able to work productively is to work as a part of a team or a group that has to work together to finish the job. And then, on most underwater welding work, being comfortable working underwater on your own is also a good attitude to build up. A successful welder needs to have these both modes to be able to function well in the job.
Practical ability to work with its hands
Equipments and machineries needs modifying or could break down, you need to have mechanical capacity, to be able to fix problems and undertake basic maintenance and being comfortable using tools.
There is a learning process for everyone, the more skills you already possess, especially on hands-on skills, the faster and the more chances you can be employed and make a good living. There are also fundamental skills that are essential in underwater welding or underwater welding skills that are needed in work. These skills are:
Rigging and dogging
An underwater welder at least has the basic rigging skills and to be able to work with wire ropes and fibre and chain. The skills to tie knots and lashings, splicing and whipping are also necessary skills, as is using soft and hard slings, chain blocks, tuggers, come-alongs, tirfors, hoists, derricks.
Welding
The more welding experience you get the better a welder you will be, and dry land welding is a pretty basic and very useful skill to have as a construction diver. Although quality welding underwater is quite difficult, with wet welding training you can undertake basic tasks such as ship hull repair, underwater maintenance or anode replacement. Being a good welder enables you to repair or modify gear, fix equipment to steel decks and generally be very practical and useful on the dive site and in during mob and de-mob operations
Cutting and burning
Underwater welding carry out more cutting or burning underwater than welding as it is a basic technique for cutting sheet piles, trimming damaged plates, removing weld, removing tubular supports and preparing edges. Cutting methods have been used for constructing and installing new offshore and harbor facilities, subsea pipelines, and often used for repair and maintenance. Includes mending the damaged caused by corrosion, accidents in oil platforms, pipelines, repairing holes in ship. With that, cutting and burning skills are really important skills an underwater welder should have.
These skills and attitudes that an underwater welder should have could be learned and could be easily within you. A seasoned and experienced occupational diver is a consummate professional; always willing to learn new things & constant in their approach to safe, productive diving operations. It is very critical then, that a new diver or underwater welder must develop and sustain an attitude of professionalism in his/her work. Even though you are new in this kind of work, a person will do his/her best to be able to compete with the other people and with this an underwater welder will have the resolve to have the skills and attitudes in order to continuously strive for more and sooner or later an underwater welder can go in advance in the career, and to be able to earn more. Like all the other careers, attitudes and skills are the two complementary things a person must develop for that person to have a built up well-being and a successful and fruitful career.