Shas­tri Boodan

There is a grow­ing de­mand for steel fab­ri­ca­tors in the con­struc­tion sec­tor. This is ac­cord­ing to Theroon Cyrus, Fab­ri­ca­tion In­struc­tor at the Afif G Na­j­jar Fab­ri­ca­tion and Weld­ing In­sti­tute. Cyrus and stu­dents at­tached to the in­sti­tute made a site vis­it to the new hous­ing de­vel­op­ment at Brent­wood, Ch­agua­nas on Wednes­day. He said the de­mand for skilled fab­ri­ca­tors, both lo­cal­ly and re­gion­al­ly, is sur­pass­ing the sup­ply of trained in­di­vid­u­als . He said skilled fab­ri­ca­tors can earn up­wards of $35 per hour.

Cyrus re­vealed that the in­sti­tute trains a max­i­mum of 16 per­sons an­nu­al­ly and has done so for the last sev­en years.

The pro­gramme is done in con­junc­tion with Met­al-X En­gi­neer­ing Lim­it­ed, Ch­agua­nas and YTEPP Lim­it­ed where co­horts are trained for one year. The pro­gramme was de­signed around 2009 by Labib Na­j­jar, the Chair­man of Met­al-X En­gi­neer­ing Lim­it­ed who he ap­proached YTEPP with a pro­pos­al. The pro­gram start­ed on April 25, 2012 and stu­dents are trained to meet the stan­dards set by the Amer­i­can In­sti­tute of Steel Con­struc­tion.

The pro­gram con­sists of both aca­d­e­m­ic and prac­ti­cal learn­ing con­tent. The full time train­ing con­sists of three months be­ing spent in the class­room and nine months out­side in the fab­ri­ca­tion work­shop. Some of its con­tent in­cludes au­to-CAD and tech­ni­cal draw­ing for fab­ri­ca­tion and build­ings, struc­tur­al fab­ri­ca­tion weld­ing, grind­ing, cut­ting, drilling, shap­ing, rig­ging and paint­ing of all steel mem­bers, beams, columns, truss­es, rafters and deck­ing pan, joints and an­gles, tool us­age, mea­sur­ing, busi­ness skills, life skills and work­ing on re­al-world projects.

There has been a 100 per cent suc­cess rate of grad­u­ates gain­ing em­ploy­ment.