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Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers

Design, fabricate, adjust, repair, or appraise jewelry, gold, silver, other precious metals, or gems.

What you’d do

  • Clean and polish metal items and jewelry pieces, using jewelers' tools, polishing wheels, and chemical baths.
  • Smooth soldered joints and rough spots, using hand files and emery paper, and polish smoothed areas with polishing wheels or buffing wire.
  • Create jewelry from materials such as gold, silver, platinum, and precious or semiprecious stones.
  • Cut and file pieces of jewelry such as rings, brooches, bracelets, and lockets.
  • Examine assembled or finished products to ensure conformance to specifications, using magnifying glasses or precision measuring instruments.
  • Make repairs, such as enlarging or reducing ring sizes, soldering pieces of jewelry together, and replacing broken clasps and mountings.
  • Compute costs of labor and materials to determine production costs of products and articles.
  • Position stones and metal pieces, and set, mount, and secure items in place, using setting and hand tools.

Skills that matter

  • Active Listening
  • Critical Thinking
  • Speaking
  • Coordination
  • Judgment and Decision Making
  • Social Perceptiveness

How to get there

Medium preparation: usually vocational school, related on-the-job experience, or an associate's degree

Also called

  • Bench Jeweler
  • Goldsmith
  • Jeweler
  • Silversmith
  • Appraiser
  • Artisan Jeweler

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