How do people develop competence and even expertise across knowledge domains? This chapter introduces the goal of the book: to relate my journey toward the breadth as well as depth of competences required by work in a repair and metal fabrication shop. After relaying my road to Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication, the context of this autoethnography, I discuss related research on career and technical education (i.e., vocational education and training), and I explain how Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace adds to those contributions. I relate the book’s data: my daily notes and photographs from the shop; my conversations with welders and other employees at the 10 shops that I visited from January to December 2022; conversations among members of online communities focused on welding and machining; and secondary research from experts in education, sociology, and other fields. Then, I describe the path from novice-level to expert-level knowledge and delineate the characteristics of expert-level knowledge. In relating the ways my learning experiences support and sometimes contradict research on workplace learning and how my burgeoning competences compare to the myriad expertises of my boss, I hope to further research on workplace learning and to make the way easier for others who are learning a trade.