What does a Boilermaker
actually do all day?
top skill Operations Monitoringcore tasks 6median pay $76,410AI exposure 0/100
Boilermakers is deadline-driven, on your feet, people-heavy work. Precision matters a lot here.
What this job actually does all day
The representative tasks O*NET analysts recorded for this role — not a glossy job ad, the real work.
- Conduct pressure tests on vessels, such as boilers.
- Study blueprints to determine locations, relationships, or dimensions of parts.
- Examine boilers, pressure vessels, tanks, or vats to locate defects, such as leaks, weak spots, or defective sections, so that they can be repaired.
- Inspect assembled vessels or individual components, such as tubes, fittings, valves, controls, or auxiliary mechanisms, to locate any defects.
- Lay out plate, sheet steel, or other heavy metal and locate and mark bending and cutting lines, using protractors, compasses, and drawing instruments or templates.
- Bell, bead with power hammers, or weld pressure vessel tube ends to ensure leakproof joints.
Skills & environment
Bars are O*NET importance/intensity ratings, scaled 0–100 so you can compare at a glance.
The skills it demands most
What the environment feels like
Deadline pressure: constant deadline pressureConflict & friction: rarely deals with conflictNeed to be exact: precision is criticalTime spent sitting: mostly on your feet / movingContact with people: constantly dealing with people
Go deeper on this role
How this is built. Tasks, skills, and work-environment ratings come from the
U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET occupational analysis — job analysts survey real workers, so this is the
closest thing to "what the job is actually like" in public data. Skill scores are O*NET Importance
ratings (0–5) and environment measures are Context ratings (0–5), both rescaled to 0–100 here for
easy reading. This task-and-skill detail comes straight from the O*NET database — it's
pulled straight from the survey, not invented. Figures describe the typical role, not any one person's job.
