A senior tech retires. Twenty-five, thirty, sometimes forty years of corrosion control work walks out the door with him. He hands off his keys, his tools, and a binder of notes that mostly only he knew how to read. The rectifier that always ran a little loud at the south station, he knew why. The casing test at the river crossing that always read odd in the spring, he knew why. The contractor whose cadwelds you had to pay attention to, he knew which one.
None of that was in the binder.
The next morning, somebody else has the route. Maybe a tech with five years in. Maybe a kid two months out of his first CP course. Either way, what walked out the door is gone, and the work still has to get done. The pipeline doesn't care that the person who used to look after it isn't there anymore.
This is the quiet version of a problem the corrosion industry has been talking around for at least a decade. There is a generation of senior technicians retiring, and the knowledge they carry, the kind that doesn't fit in a textbook, is leaving with them. The next generation is coming up the way most of us did: figuring it out in the truck, hoping somebody shows them the right way before they make a costly mistake.
Some of them will get a good mentor. A lot of them will not.
Why This Trade Is Different
Corrosion control is not a mainstream trade. It is not what a kid picks in shop class. Most of the people doing this work today did not set out to do it, they got pulled into it.
That is how the field has staffed itself for decades. It has worked, more or less, because the older technicians were patient enough to teach, and the work was forgiving enough that early mistakes did not always cost much.
Both of those conditions are eroding.
The patient teachers are retiring on a faster schedule than the trade is replacing them. And the regulatory and operational expectations on a CP technician are higher than they used to be. Standards that filled a thin chapter now fill an entire manual. The room for "figuring it out as you go" is smaller than it was.
What is available, when somebody decides to learn this work the right way, is mostly built around certification. They are scheduled in person, in cities most people in this trade do not live in, at prices that often require an employer's approval.
A working tech who needs to actually understand what current density is — not for the test, but for the rectifier sizing he is doing on Tuesday — has fewer good options than the breadth of the field would suggest.
"The knowledge that's hardest to replace is the knowledge that was never written down in the first place."
What Gets Lost First
The first thing to go, when an older tech leaves, is the judgment layer.
The procedural knowledge survives in books and standards. AMPP SP0169 still says what it says. Peabody is still on the shelf. The instant-off criterion is still −850 mV CSE. None of that walks out the door.
What walks out the door is the layer above the procedure. The part that knows a survey reading went positive because the portable interrupter was set wrong and not because there is a real protection problem. The part that has seen which reading to trust when two of them disagree
That is mentorship knowledge. It is built one specific situation at a time, over years, in the cab of the truck and in the office afterward when someone older asks the junior tech what he saw and why he did what he did.
When the older tech is no longer there to ask, that layer takes years to rebuild, and not every junior tech rebuilds it. Some get partway and stop. Some leave the trade. Some keep working, doing the procedural part well, missing the judgment part entirely, and not knowing what they are missing.
That last group is the one that worries us the most. A technician who knows what he doesn't know will keep asking. A technician who doesn't know what he doesn't know will not.
How We Got Here
This newsletter was never really planned. It started in 2025 as a few weekly posts on LinkedIn. Corrosion related topics, a few work pictures, things we thought might be useful. At one point we had a rather lengthy post that instead was featured as an article and then a newsletter.
We moved over to own platform, added longer articles, added a paid tier for deeper content. People asked for more. Some of those readers were not asking for more articles, they were asking for structured training. A real ladder they could climb on their own time, on their own schedule, that built up to something at the end.
We had material for it already. Years of training notes from running private courses for clients, from speaking at industry conventions, from helping other companies put their own training programs together. For a long time, the plan had been to keep publishing it as articles.
After enough conversations about what we wanted to do, we built it as a full training system instead. Staying true to the newsletter motto: To provide something useful.
What We Built
It is at training.rcswv.com. Three tracks: External Corrosion, Internal Corrosion, and Coatings. Inside each track, a ladder of fifty-three rungs across the three of them, with five to eight modules on each rung. The modules are structured the way we wish more training materials were: read the technical content, listen to the audio walk-through on the way to the job, work through the calculation or the procedure, then quiz at the end. It's a work in progress, but we've already started posting the first batch of modules.
Finish a rung, the platform issues a printable certificate. The certificate has the modules completed, the duration logged, the date earned, and audit fields built in for PDH and CEC reporting.
There is also a members forum. A place to ask a question, post what you are seeing in the field, get an answer back from us or from another member. That part matters more than the certificates, in some ways. The trade has always been small and connected (most of us know somebody who knows somebody) and a place where the conversation is about the work, not about who is selling what, is something we wanted in there from the start.
The catalog is not a fixed library you check off and walk away from. We add new modules every week. The way Field Notes adds an article every week, the same way. New equipment comes into the field, we talk about it. New standards land, we update. New tracks get added when a topic earns a place.
"You are not buying a one-time download. You are subscribing to something we are still building."
A Few Honest Notes
We are corrosion technicians, not website builders. The platform is a work in progress. There are rough edges. There are modules in the catalog right now that we are going to rewrite when we get back to them, and there are topics we know we should cover that have not been built yet. Feedback is welcome, and the forum is the right place for it. If something is wrong, tell us. If something is missing that you wish were there, tell us that too. The trade is small enough that the input goes straight back into the build queue.
We are not going to stop publishing the newsletter. Field Notes from RCS continues exactly the way it has been: free, weekly, on the topics we think a working tech will find useful. The training site is for the readers who told us they wanted something more structured. If that is not you, the newsletter is still here, and that is fine.
If you’ve been paying for Field Notes from RCS, training access is included. Same newsletter subscription, same content in your inbox — the full RCS Training catalog stacks on top at no extra cost. We call this the Founding Members tier; it’s a thank-you to the subscribers who were here first. This rule expires as this article is published and we’ll be brainstorming and restructuring how paid content works within our newsletter material moving forward.
Why This Matters
The corrosion industry is in a transition that is not going to slow down. The senior generation is leaving on its own timeline. The next generation is coming up faster than the trade is set up to teach. The standards keep tightening. The compliance burden keeps growing. The room for figuring it out as you go is shrinking.
Whatever the answer to that ends up being, it is probably going to involve more written-down knowledge, not less. More people teaching, not fewer. More forums where a tech can ask a real question and get a real answer, not fewer. More structured pathways into the trade for people who got pulled into it sideways, not fewer.
We built one piece of that. There is plenty of room for others to build more. If you are running a training program at a company, or you are an experienced tech with a teaching streak in you, or you are a younger tech who feels like the gap is bigger than what you are getting handed; the conversation is open. The forum is one place to have it. The newsletter inbox reply is another. We read everything.
The work is too important to let walk out the door without a fight.
Key Takeaways
A generation of senior corrosion technicians is retiring on a faster schedule than the trade is replacing them. The procedural knowledge survives in books; the judgment knowledge is what walks out the door.
Existing training in this trade is heavily weighted toward certification — necessary, but built for the credential, not the morning after.
Mentorship has historically filled the gap. As the senior bench thins, the gap is widening.
RCS Training is one attempt at something structured for working technicians: three tracks, fifty-three rungs, modules built to be read on the tablet, listened to on the drive, applied on the job, and quizzed at the end. Certificates are PDH/CEC eligible. A members forum sits alongside the catalog.
It is at training.rcswv.com. The orientation is free.
The newsletter is not changing. Field Notes from RCS continues weekly, free, on the topics a working tech will find useful.
Feedback is welcome. We are corrosion technicians, not website builders, and the platform is a work in progress.
Roberts Corrosion Services, LLC
Established in 2011, Roberts Corrosion Services, LLC delivers comprehensive, turn-key cathodic protection and corrosion control solutions nationwide. Our end-to-end expertise encompasses design and inspection, installation and repair, surveys and remedial work. We provide drilling services for deep anode installations and a full laboratory for analysis of samples and corrosion coupons, as well as custom CP Rectifier manufacturing.
While our initial focus was on the Appalachian Basin area, we complete field work all over the US. We are a licensed contractor in many states and can complete a wide range of services.
Our biggest strength is in our flexibility for our clients. Solutions and Results.
Let us know how we can help.
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Location: 39.251882, -81.047440
(304) 869-4007