Same Week, Two Wins: Boilermaker Apprentice Strikes Gold

MIGAS apprentice Lachlan Kemble has claimed Regional WorldSkills gold in welding, the same week he was signed off as a qualified boilermaker.

Lachlan Kemble was sitting in the Shephard Transport Equipment car park with his workmates unwinding after a Friday shift, when one of the owners of the business pulled up, jumped out of his car, shook his hand and drove off again without a word of explanation.

“Everyone was looking around like, what was that?” Lachlan said.

Then his foreman walked over with a ‘congratulations.’ Lachlan was confused; he’d already had cake that day for completing his boilermaker apprenticeship. What more was there to celebrate?

It turned out Linda Lay, his MIGAS field officer, had called the workshop earlier that day with the news that Lachlan had won gold at the Regional WorldSkills Welding Competition at the TAFE Queensland SkillsTech campus in Acacia Ridge. 

He was the last person to find out. The senior team at Shephard Transport Equipment already knew.

“It was pretty eventful,” Lachlan said. “Getting signed off and finding out I’d won on the same day, that was pretty cool.”

From an Engineering Classroom to the Workshop Floor

Lachlan always knew he’d end up doing something physical and practical, whether that turned out to be carpentry, metalwork, or mechanical work. The specific spark came in high school, when he followed a mate who’d been sneaking off at break to the engineering classroom.

“He said he could do it better than me, but I’m not one to back down from a challenge,” Lachlan said. “We’d never touched a welder before in our lives. We just got hooked on it.”

His father, who Lachlan described as a “jack of many trades,” wasn’t entirely sold at first. He had worked around Boilermakers on the mines and knew how hot and hard the job could be. But Lachlan had made up his mind, and he backed himself to figure the rest out.

That competitive streak followed him into his apprenticeship at Shephard Transport Equipment (STE), where he built a reputation as one of the more persistent apprentices, always chasing the next TAFE block, always pushing to finish his apprenticeship sooner.

Nerves, Stick Welding, and a Friendly Rival

When Linda first raised the WorldSkills competition with Lachlan in his first year, he knew he wanted to compete eventually but didn’t feel ready. By his fourth year, that had changed.

His toughest opponent turned out to be someone he already knew well: his STE colleague David, a third-year apprentice and a standout chassis fabricator in his own right. The two had always worked in different corners of the workshop and had never been compared head-to-head.

“We were nervous, because we’d never been put against each other before,” Lachlan said.

Neither had done structural stick welding, and the competition was built around exactly that.

“I was terrified. I don’t weld steel at all, and it was all steel, all coded welding.”

They pushed through anyway, working through three coded welds in stick welding and three in MIG welding on the day.

The competition scored each weld against a 14-point criteria covering penetration depth, consistency, and overfill and underfill. Some welds were held to a Certificate IV coded standard, a level beyond Certificate III – the qualification that most boilermaker apprentices work toward and the one Lachlan has only just achieved.

Tolerances were tight. A misalignment of more than 1 millimetre across 20 millimetres of weld cost a point. Every weld was later cut apart, and macro tested to check what was underneath the surface, something none of the competitors had experienced before.

When the scores came in, Lachlan’s card topped the board.

A Track Record Building for Years

The Regional WorldSkills win added to a run of recognition for Lachlan throughout his apprenticeship. In his first year, he received a MIGAS Scholarship in recognition of his outstanding performance. Then in 2024 Lachlan was named Engineering and Manufacturing Apprentice of the Year at the TAFE Queensland - SkillsTech CSQ Apprentice Awards.

Despite the growing list of wins, Lachlan said none of it had changed how he approached the job.

“If you’re good, you can still get better,” he said of the mindset that had carried him this far.  “Chase perfection. You’ll never get it, but you keep chasing it.”

Lachlan was quick to credit the people around him – his parents, his partner, and field officer Linda, who he joked had been putting up with his relentless persistence since day one.

“Linda’s not fully finished with me yet,” he said, already looking ahead to his Certificate IV in coded welding. “Every time I see her, I’m like, let’s get it signed up, let’s go.”

He also pointed to the culture at STE, where he’d stepped into a supervisory role for the workshop’s second-year apprentice, passing on the same hands-on approach his own leading hand once used with him.

“The way that I was treated is the same way I hope to treat everybody around me,” Lachlan said.

What’s Next

Lachlan has big ambitions and is now working toward the Certificate IV which opens the door to specialised work in aerospace, pipelines and other industries that demand certified welders. He’s also set to represent his region at the 2027 WorldSkills Australia National Championships in Adelaide.

His advice for apprentices considering competing, or just starting out?

“Rely on the people around you, and keep coming back to your reason why,” Lachlan said.

“If you have a good reason for doing it, everything else is simple. Don’t be afraid to give it a crack.”

Thinking about a career where the wins keep coming? Search apprenticeship jobs or register with MIGAS to get started.