Floorlayers install a wide range of decorative floor coverings in commercial buildings, hotels, homes and churches. If you like to work with machine tools and precision instruments, and have a keen eye for perfect fit, you might consider being a millwright. Millwrights sometimes work to specifications requiring tolerances to a thousandth of an inch. In the old days, before heavy metal machinery, millwrights carved out gears and shafts from wood for mills and small industrial plants. Today millwrights are an elite group of construction workers who work primarily in metal and with machinery and equipment requiring precision.
Millwrights install conveyor systems, escalators, giant electrical turbines and generators.
Millwrights install and do maintenance on machinery in factories, and do much of the precision work in nuclear power plants. Millwrights are skilled construction mechanics who study and interpret blueprints, and then put their knowledge and expertise to work drilling, welding, bolting and doing whatever else is necessary to assure that the cogs of industry are in perfect working order. They are the people who work with pile-driving rigs. You know, those big machines that look like cranes, but shake the ground as they drive metal, concrete or wood piling into the earth during the early stages of construction. Usually, dockbuilders are the first workers at the construction site.