In order to guarantee the safety of welding constructions, there are numerous quality standards and regulations. To achieve safety in design, process, used products or control, the knowledge and skills of the responsible staff is crucial.

Therefore it is important to create international consensus on the required skills and competences and how these can be described and tested. The jobs that are considered most important in this context, are the welding engineer and the welding inspector. The demands for the job profiles are developed in the international Leonardo da Vinci project “Continued”, which is executed under auspicion of the European Welding Federation.

In this project several new learning methods and educational instruments are developed. Van der Meer & van Tilburg investigated the industry’s requirements and developed assessment methods and a personal certification programme for periodic certification.