A student works on an assignment during a welding class at Clatsop Community College.

A new effort to expand the welding program at Clatsop Community College is aiming to repair the disconnect between education pathways and industry needs.

Mike Brosius, a retired Costco executive, took an interest in the issue after conversations with Bob Dorn, of Hyak Maritime, and Willie Toristoja, of WCT Marine and Construction, about labor needs for the development of the boatyard at Tongue Point, which will include the installation of an electric, 1,500-ton boat lift.

“We started listing all of the different employees that are going to be needed and Willie at the end said, ‘Hey, the biggest thing I’m going to need, from a pure numbers standpoint, are welders,’” Brosius said. “So then I started to ask, ‘OK, where do welders – where do you get them from?’”

From asking those questions, Brosius found that most of the welders hired at WCT Marine and Construction were poached from other places, rather than coming out of the welding program at the college. Although the college has a successful welding program, industry leaders such as Toristoja and Greg Morrill, of Bergerson Construction, emphasized that the program’s curriculum doesn’t always align with local demand for welders.

Over the past three months, Brosius, Toristoja and Morrill have met with leadership at the college to come up with strategies to bridge the gap.

“There’s been some really constructive conversations now, and I think that’s what it’s going to take to really have something meaningful here,” Morrill said. “For example, the college has always had a welding program, but it’s typically a program of study working towards an associate’s degree or a certificate of completion. On the industry side, that’s only mildly meaningful.”

Potential expansion

What companies typically need is welders who receive their American Welding Society certification, a process that can take as little as three to six months. Another gap identified in the conversations with the college was the need for evening and weekend courses, as well as a bilingual instructor.

“A lot of times there are folks that are already working, that need to be working on a certification,” Morrill said. “So what is it that the community college can do to help fit that need without getting them into a full program of study, because they’re already working 40, 50 hours a week?”

To meet the needs, Brosius hopes to help the college seek funding for an additional welding instructor to expand offerings, working with former state Sen. Betsy Johnson to identify possible funding sources. He estimates that the expansion would require approximately half a million dollars for the first three years, with the program then able to sustain itself after the pilot period.

The program’s courses are currently full, with two full-time instructors, according to Kristen Wilkin, the college’s dean for workforce education and training. She noted that the welding program has collaborated with local industry in the past, such as a partnership with Hampton Lumber.

“We’d really like to be able to grow the program so that we have more hours available to our local industry and have more partnerships like we’ve had and we still have,” Wilkin said.

The partnership also hopes to expand the number of local people going into welding. Toristoja noted that most of the welders he hires come from outside the area, and because of the difficulty finding housing on the North Coast, many of them commute from Portland or Vancouver, Washington.

“We put them up on the tugboats down there,” Toristoja said. “They live on the tugboats because there’s no place to live down here. Our tugboats are fully livable — that’s what they’re designed to do, is live on them. But when the boat goes to work, then we’re putting them up in hotels, which is expensive.”

Brosius hopes that with the help of evening and weekend courses at the college, people already living in the area and working other jobs can transition into welding and earn a better living.

“If we can do nights, weekends — which the school has not historically done — now, all of a sudden, you got people that are working in whatever their other jobs are, but now they can find the time to do it and not have to quit,” he said.

Collaboration

Brosius also hopes that the collaboration between the college and industry on welding will set an example for future collaborations in the region.

“My goal of this is, let’s prove that this concept works and then let’s start taking it to the next level,” he said. “What does this community need next? … And then how do we take that partnership and drive those partnerships with — ‘Here’s what the business needs, here’s what the school can provide, here’s what we can do for funding.’ And we get all these people together, and then we actually create something that works and makes a difference.”

Wilkin noted that the college is also open to offering new classes that might better align with what industry needs, such as aluminum welding. Toristoja questioned how the college might be able to help train welders to his company’s American Bureau of Shipping welding procedures, a specialized certification required for work on larger ships.

“If we could work with the college and we can implement what our procedure is, then they could kind of practice and test to our procedure,” Toristoja said. “So if they do come on board with us, we know that they’re able to pass that weld test, and they have the skill to do it and know what they’re doing.”

Industry leaders emphasized that talking with the college to communicate what their needs are is the first step toward an ongoing collaboration.

“I love that these conversations are happening because it’s — I think the only way to solve workforce issues is when there’s engagement between academia and industry,” Morrill said. “Otherwise, you get too siloed and nobody knows what the other one is doing. But if we can collaborate, that’s the way to solve the issues.”