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LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS
first universities to provide a full-time degree programme when welding engineering was
established within its Industrial Engineering Department in 1948. The Cranfield Institute
of Technology in the UK, another example, was established in 1961 and also offered
postgraduate welding courses and these were regularly advertised throughout the 1970s,
or even earlier than this. Other universities in the UK offered postgraduate degree courses
for welding engineers including the University of Strathclyde and Aston University in
Birmingham. The E.O. Paton Electric Welding Institute in Ukraine added a new dimension
to the qualification of welding engineers when literally hundreds of welding engineers
graduated each year from their training centres throughout Russia and through courses
supported by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).
Until the late 1980s almost every industrialised country had its own
system for training, qualification and certification of welding personnel.
There was, however, no other uniform means outside national boundaries of
assessing whether or not welding professionals, or practitioners, fulfilled the
requirements expected of them. There was wide disparity from country to
country and with increased trade and mobility of labour, or skills, it became
imperative that some form of harmonisation between national programmes
be introduced to ensure uniformity and transferability in the education,
training, qualification and certification (ETQ&C) of welding personnel.
In Europe there was already a wide interest in harmonising qualifications of welding
professionals, such as welding engineers, technologists and specialists, through the European
Council for Cooperation in Welding (ECCW) which was founded in 1974. Members
included Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK
– all members of IIW although Ireland withdrew from membership of IIW at a later date. In
the 1980s, a series of ‘guidelines’ were developed by ECCW as part of a European funded
project. The aim of the project was to establish a single harmonised system for the ETQ&C
of Welding Engineers, Welding Technologists and Welding Specialists throughout Europe.³
At the conclusion of the project it was quickly realised that the implementation of
the new guidelines needed to be controlled in order to ensure uniformity, without which
confidence in the harmonised system would be lost. What was required was a quality
assurance approach that involved the auditing of qualification and certification bodies in
accordance with agreed criteria. Mr Tim Jessop (UK) of TWI was foremost in introducing
this approach through his work with the UK National Accreditation Body on the proposed
new European Standard for the accreditation of personnel certification bodies. TWI became
the first certification body in Europe to achieve accreditation to the new standard.
4
It was this approach that was adopted by ECCW when it changed its name to the
European Federation for Welding, Joining and Cutting (EWF) in 1992. The intent of EWF
was to extend a partnership arrangement for the recognition of welding qualifications to