IIW History 1990-2015

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

LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS