How to Become a Jeweller: Apprenticeship, University, Short Courses or Self-Taught

The first thing you learn at a jeweller's bench is not how to design a ring. It is how to file a piece of brass perfectly flat, for hours, knowing it will never become anything.

That is what surprises people most when they start: jewellery is a trade of the hands before it is a trade of ideas. You can learn it at sixteen on an apprenticeship, at forty on a bench after a career change, or alone at home with a workbench and a great deal of patience. These four routes genuinely exist, they do not lead to the same place, and they do not cost the same time or the same money.

Our rings are made by hand, by artisans who learned at the bench and came up through the trade. That is where our reading of these four routes comes from: they do not prepare you for the same job, and two of them do not prepare you for a job at all, which does not make them any less worthwhile. Here is what each one teaches, what it costs, and which one fits what you want to do with your hands.

"Becoming a jeweller" covers at least four trades, and nobody learns them all at once.

The bench jeweller works the metal: piercing, forming, soldering, fitting, assembling the piece. The goldsmith builds the structure that will hold the stones and show them off, work that starts the moment a gemstone enters the equation. The setter seats those stones and closes the metal over them, by hand, under a microscope. The polisher gives the piece its final surface, and decides what the light will do when it hits it.

The clearest proof that these are separate trades sits in the apprenticeship standard itself: the Level 3 "Jewellery, silversmithing and allied trades professional" groups a dozen distinct occupations, and a setter who has spent three years setting stones is not expected to fabricate a mount from scratch, nor asked to.

Several pairs of hands touch one of our rings before it reaches its box. That is the reality of the trade, and it is good news when you are learning: you do not need to master everything to be useful in a workshop.

There is no single way into the trade in the UK. There are four, and the right one depends entirely on what you are aiming for: a career, a side business, or a weekend passion.

The first two rows lead to a job. The last two lead to a practice, which is a perfectly respectable goal, as long as you know it before you start.

This is the route the trade itself recommends, and the one Google associates most closely with the word jeweller. The official standard is the Level 3 "Jewellery, silversmithing and allied trades professional", typically around three years, spent mostly in a real workshop with day release or block release for the theory.

Apprentices are employed and paid from the first day, at apprentice rates to begin with, and the training itself costs them nothing. The Goldsmiths' Company runs its own long-standing scheme, placing apprentices with master craftsmen in London and beyond; the British Academy of Jewellery delivers the standard in London and Birmingham, with employers across the Jewellery Quarter and Hatton Garden.

The order of learning is the same everywhere:

• piercing, filing and soldering first, for weeks, before anything resembling a piece of jewellery
• fabrication and repair next, sizing rings, retipping claws, replacing shanks, the daily bread of a working bench
• setting and finishing last, once the hands are steady

There is no upper age limit, and applicants in their late twenties and thirties are common. What employers look for is not a CV but a few pieces you have made, however modest, and the patience to spend a first year on polishing and sizing before anyone hands you a stone.

Past the apprenticeship, the other formal route is a degree or diploma in jewellery design, and it leads somewhere slightly different: to the drawing board and the CAD screen more than to the bench.

The Birmingham School of Jewellery, Central Saint Martins in London and the Glasgow School of Art are the best-known names, alongside foundation degrees and HNDs at colleges across the country. Three years for a BA, one for a foundation or top-up, at standard university fees. Graduates come out with a portfolio, a design vocabulary and a network; bench skills vary enormously from one course to another, and many graduates go on to a short course or an apprenticeship to acquire them.

One expense catches people off guard on every route: a personal set of hand tools, typically £400 to £800, is expected of every student and apprentice, and follows you for the rest of your working life.

Short courses and online classes carry no qualification, and most of the people taking them are not looking for one. You learn jewellery the way you take up painting or cooking: for the pleasure of the work, to make the piece you cannot find in any shop, to give something you made with your own hands.

If you are considering the trade, these courses serve a different purpose: they answer the one question that decides everything before you commit three years of your life, whether you actually enjoy the work.

What video teaches well: the vocabulary of the bench, reading a drawing, cold forming, stringing and wirework, resin and polymer clay, assembling a simple piece. What it teaches badly: anything involving fire. Soldering is learned beside someone who knows, because a torch does not forgive approximation, and a second pair of eyes corrects in three seconds what a video lets you repeat for months. This is why so many people start with a silversmithing course: a supervised torch, a few evenings a week, at the Goldsmiths' Centre in Clerkenwell, at the British Academy of Jewellery, or at a local adult education college.

The most common beginner's mistake is buying a full bench before filing a first square of brass. Buy tools as the exercises call for them.

You can learn alone, on one condition: start with the metal, not with the jewellery.

The minimum workstation fits in six lines:

• a jeweller's bench, or a sturdy table fitted with a wooden bench peg
• a piercing saw and a pack of blades
• a set of hand files, from coarse to fine
• four pairs of pliers: flat-nose, round-nose, half-round, and snips
• a ring mandrel (triblet) and a rawhide mallet, for forming and sizing
• a torch, a soldering block and a pickle pot

Budget £400 to £800 for the whole setup, half that if you buy second-hand, and jewellery tools change hands often. Then three exercises, in this order, before any actual piece:

1. File a square of brass perfectly flat and square. This is the exercise that trains the hand, and the one everyone wants to skip.
2. Form a ring band, solder it, round it on the triblet, then size it to an exact finger size.
3. Solder two wires into a T without melting the first joint, which teaches you to control heat rather than add it.

Until those three are clean, a ring will not be either.

Self-taught jewellers do not improve by watching videos. They improve by showing their failures to someone who knows.

Online forums and maker communities do this better than any tutorial: post a failed solder joint, come back with the explanation. Evening classes and adult education colleges, often inexpensive, give you access to a supervised torch. And trade fairs and the open days of the Jewellery Quarter remain the best places to watch setters work up close, which is worth hours of reading.

No. No qualification is required to make or sell jewellery in the UK. But the moment you work in gold, silver or platinum, the law imposes obligations that no course teaches, and that many discover after their first sale.

• Under the Hallmarking Act 1973, it is an offence to describe or sell an article as gold, silver, platinum or palladium unless it has been hallmarked, above 1 gram for gold, 7.78 grams for silver, 0.5 gram for platinum and 1 gram for palladium.
• Hallmarking is done by one of the four Assay Offices: London, Birmingham, Sheffield and Edinburgh. They test the metal, then strike the marks.
• Before that, every maker must register a sponsor's mark with an Assay Office, the initials that identify who is responsible for the piece.
• Anyone selling precious metal must display the statutory Dealer's Notice explaining the marks, in a shop or on a website.

These obligations, far more than any qualification, are what separate an amateur from a professional. They also explain why so many makers start out in brass, copper or steel before touching silver or gold: above a gram, the Assay Office is involved.