Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers

What Does a Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers Do?

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

Day-to-Day Responsibilities

• 1Clean and polish metal items and jewelry pieces, using jewelers' tools, polishing wheels, and chemical baths.
• 2Smooth soldered joints and rough spots, using hand files and emery paper, and polish smoothed areas with polishing wheels or buffing wire.
• 3Create jewelry from materials such as gold, silver, platinum, and precious or semiprecious stones.
• 4Cut and file pieces of jewelry such as rings, brooches, bracelets, and lockets.
• 5Examine assembled or finished products to ensure conformance to specifications, using magnifying glasses or precision measuring instruments.
• 6Make repairs, such as enlarging or reducing ring sizes, soldering pieces of jewelry together, and replacing broken clasps and mountings.
• 7Compute costs of labor and materials to determine production costs of products and articles.
• 8Position stones and metal pieces, and set, mount, and secure items in place, using setting and hand tools.

Required Skills

• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Photoshop
• Computer assisted jewelry design CAD software
• Customer information databases
• Intuit QuickBooks
• Inventory tracking software
• Jewelry store point of sale POS software
• Metal designing software
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Outlook

Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers Salary