Build Success by Building Soft Skills

Successful welding inspectors speak multiple languages. While a working knowledge of Spanish would help in many situations, the most important languages for a CWI to speak are ones like “welder,” “supervisor,” “quality manager,” “engineer,” and “corner office.”

“To be a welding inspector, you have to have good people skills and good management skills, I need to know all the definitions and slang that welders use in the field. When I go to talk to them, they understand that I know exactly what they’re doing and how they need to operate to make their job successful.

“To be a welding inspector, you have to have good people skills and good management skills,” says Scott Witkowski, CWI and Vice President, Republic Testing Laboratories, Inc. , a provider of metallurgical testing and engineering services, including PRQ/WPS development and welder qualification. “I need to know all the definitions and slang that welders use in the field. When I go to talk to them, they understand that I know exactly what they’re doing and how they need to operate to make their job successful.”

Witkowski started welding at age 12 on the family ranch in Texas using an old AC/DC cracker box (there’s some of that slang), ultimately learning to fit, weld and fabricate everything from carbon steel pipeline to the alloys used in the refining industry. He obtained his CWI at age 21, but the learning never stopped.

Witkowski will share his more than 30 years of success in a presentation titled “Business/Client Relationships for Inspectors (Soft Skills)” at the upcoming AWS Inspection and Expo Conference (IEC, Nov. 8 -10 in Austin, Texas). He will be joined by Dustin Brungardt, CWI and Technical Director at C-Spec (a provider of software for welding code compliance), who has more than 20 years of experience.

“As a welding inspector, you also need be able to talk to owner-operators and leadership teams and give them the confidence that what you’re doing as a service provider is being performed in a manner that they deem acceptable to meet code requirements for AWS, ASME or API,” says Brungardt. “It’s like inspectors are the conductor of an orchestra and they need to be able to coordinate all the different instruments.”

Witkowski says welding inspectors may be knowledgeable individuals and have good intentions, but the key to success is how they present that knowledge.

“You can’t rub people the wrong way. An old boss of mine gave the cassette tapes for Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People,” says Witkowski. “I wore that set of tapes out and bought copies for other people who struggled to communicate.”

?“Another thing is that you have to mentor under somebody to improve your decision-making,” adds Brungardt. “We all make mistakes, but when you do, learn from it. Call a mentor and say, ‘Hey, did I approach this properly? How could I have done better?’”

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If you’re an inspector who wants to learn how to build better soft skills, introduce yourself to Witkowski and Brungardt at the AWS Inspection and Expo Conference .