Welder Underground Expands Training With Support From NYPA
Cohort 3 has begun at Welder Underground. With support from the New York Power Authority, we are expanding access to advanced welding and fabrication training, career readiness support, and the kind of hands-on learning that turns skill into a future.
Welder Underground Apprentice Learning 3F
The clean energy future is a physical future. It will be measured, cut, fitted, welded, inspected, and built by skilled hands.
Cohort 3 Is in the Shop
On any given day at Welder Underground It sounds like grinders and tape measures. It looks like apprentices leaning over a drawing, checking a dimension twice, learning how a line on paper becomes something that can hold weight.
Cohort 3 at Welder Underground
That is where Cohort 3 begins.
This new group of apprentices is now deep in the work: reading technical drawings, building muscle memory, learning the discipline of prep and fit-up, practicing safe shop habits, and developing the kind of precision that separates a passable weld from professional work. They are learning how to make things. They are also learning how to move through a jobsite, ask better questions, take feedback, support a crew, and trust the slow process of becoming skilled.
For us, that process has always been the point.
Why this work matters now
Apprentices learning MIG at Welder Underground
New York’s clean energy future will depend on policy, planning, engineering, and investment. It will also depend on people who can build.
The clean energy economy is physical. It needs workers who can read drawings, work safely, hold tolerances, solve problems in real time, and bring care to materials that do not forgive shortcuts. Welding and fabrication belong in that conversation because infrastructure does not become real until someone can make it stand up.
Welder Underground exists for that intersection: craft, opportunity, and the future of work. We train apprentices through an earn-while-you-learn model rooted in real projects, real expectations, and real community. Our cohorts build skills through hands-on fabrication, including large-scale public art projects created in collaboration with established artists. The work is technical, creative, and demanding. That mix is what makes it powerful.
Growing the program with support from NYPA
This year, Welder Underground is expanding that work with support from the New York Power Authority. Through clean energy workforce development funding approved by NYPA’s Board of Trustees, Welder Underground received a $740,000 award to expand access to advanced welding and fabrication training, career readiness support, job placement, and long-term employment opportunities in high-demand trades.
We are grateful for NYPA’s investment because it recognizes what we see every day in the shop: strong workforce development requires strong support around the training itself.
A welding program succeeds when apprentices have access to instruction, tools, protective equipment, transportation support, certification preparation, coaching, and follow-through after the first job offer. Talent is everywhere. Access is the work. Retention is the work. Confidence is the work. The weld is visible, but the structure around the welder matters just as much.
This support allows us to keep building a program that takes the whole apprentice seriously.
What apprentices are building
Cohort 3 is learning in the space between discipline and imagination. One day may be about technical drawings and measurement. Another may be about grinding, tack welds, material handling, or the quiet patience it takes to make two pieces meet the way the drawing says they should. Every small correction becomes part of the larger skill set.
That kind of learning is difficult to fake. It happens in the body. It happens when an apprentice understands why the prep matters, why safety is culture, why the quality of a finished piece begins long before the arc starts.
It also happens in the community. Apprentices learn from instructors, from each other, from artists, from fabricators, and from the standards of the shop itself. They see what is possible when creative work and technical training are held together with rigor.
Accountability to the future
Public investment comes with responsibility. We take that seriously.
Our goal is to graduate welders and metal fabricators who are prepared for opportunities: people with technical ability, professional habits, industry-recognized credentials, and the confidence to keep growing after the program ends.
We will continue tracking outcomes that matter, including job placement, starting wages, and retention, because a training program should be measured by what apprentices are able to build after they complete the program.
A big thank you to NYPA for helping make this work possible. Your support strengthens a pathway into skilled trades, creative fabrication, and the clean energy economy that New York is building now.
