Teaching methods have changed since Tom Fitzgerald learned to be a welder three decades ago.

“It was pretty rough,” Fitzgerald said.

How rough?

“There wasn’t a lot of training involved. You got trained and you didn’t know you were getting trained. It was just like, ‘Hey, dummy, you did that wrong.’ ”

Fitzgerald, fresh out of high school near Seattle, lapped it up. That’s the way apprentice welders were taught and he was hungry for information from the veterans.

Today, Fitzgerald, 49, is part of the cadre of experienced welders at shipbuilder and metal fabricator Vigor that is teaching the next generation of welders.

Mentorship, apprenticeship, union referral and community college-based programs are expected to help supply the next generation of welders in a craft that will be pressed to meet demand. That training will be performed against the backdrop of an expected nationwide shortage of more than 200,000 skilled welders by 2020, according to the American Welding Society.