Payson High Welding Students Tour Action Target
“Not just anyone gets to weld for Action Target,” Steve Williams, Operations Manager for Action Target, told Payson High School students before their facility tour, “The industry says a 1/8” tolerance is acceptable – here at Action Target we will flag and pull production any work that doesn’t exceed 1/32” precision.”
At Action Target, we believe in inspiring the next generation of innovators, especially in the great Nebo School District of Utah County we get to call home. A group of 50 eager students from Payson High School’s welding program stepped into the heart of our manufacturing facility to bridge the gap between education and industry. Unique from many environments manufacturers work in, Action Target employees enjoy comfortable temperatures throughout our 100,000sqft facility due to no open flames being used. Coupling that with the clean working environment, we had several motivated students asking for business cards and advice on how to get hired.
Insights From Action Target Welders
Students gained perspectives from Action Target welders as young as 18 years old and as old as 71, highlighting a major benefit of learning this skill as it provides longevity in career. Students were able to learn from some who continued welding their entire professional life, and others who have used welding as a steppingstone into manufacturing, engineering, entrepreneurship, and more. “Welding is a valuable skillset, and even as we consider new state of the art machinery, we still want trained welders to be running those machines,” Trent Peterson, Manufacturing Engineer, advised on his tour.
The Manufacturing Process at Action Target
Students were guided through the various stages of production; from initial design concepts, to the burn tables, then stations set up for bending steel, welding, painting, and the final assembly of our state-of-the-art systems. Hannah Evanson, Manufacturing Engineer, mentioned to her tour group “welding and really the entire manufacturing process requires as much creativity as it does plain hard work. When you break it down that’s really what we do here, we get creative in designing anything that might work better, we find raw materials that would make that idea feasible, and through that process we end up building better and safer shooting range equipment than what existed before us”.
Bridging the Gap Between Classroom and Workplace
By exposing students to real-world applications of the skills they’re learning, we aim to bridge the gap between the classroom and the workplace. Students left our facility with a newfound appreciation for precision engineering and the world of manufacturing. The job market is bright for creative and hard-working individuals that learn how to weld, and Payson High’s program exemplifies these next generation professionals we would be proud to work alongside in the future.
For more information about working at Action Target or to view our current openings, please check out our Careers Page.
