JONES COUNTY, Miss. (WDAM) - Jones College recently received a grant to help lead students to careers in welding, a field currently lacking workers.

The college was the only school in Mississippi to receive the $25,000 grant from the American Welding Society’s Foundation.

Rod Tolbert, a professional welder and Dean of Career and Technical Education at Jones, said this money would help purchase up-to-date equipment and create more efficiency in the welding shop.

“We have students in this shop from 7 in the morning to almost 10 o’clock at night every day during the week,” said Tolbert. “We do a lot of training. We want to help train professional welders to fill the skills gap that we are seeing right now in our community.”

He also said the workforce gap for trained welders is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade.

“You know, when I came through it, everybody was going to a four-year college,” said Tolbert. “Nowadays, there’s a lot of importance on our middle-skill jobs or highly skilled jobs even. We need these people. We need welders. We need plumbers. We need electricians. We need all these things to help the area.”

According to Tolbert, the American Welding Society awards the college’s welder qualifications.

“We went through the interview process through the American Welding Society, and we described to them and they were able to see firsthand the efforts we put into our welding program,” said Tolbert. “We have some of the greatest instructors in the world. They’re always moving and shifting to try and improve students to make them more highly skilled.”

Jones College’s welding programs have about 40-50 students, but with the additional equipment purchased, the program will be able to enroll up to 120 students.

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