A garment technician is known as pattern master, who looks into pattern making, garment fit aspects etc. A garment technician has a set of roles and responsibilities in a factory and in a buying office. Major job responsibilities of a garment technician are listed below.
Pattern making:
Make patterns on pattern paper based on style specification sheet. Where factory has a computer aided design (CAD) systems, a technician, draft manual pattern into a CAD system, develop patterns on a computer.
Pattern grading:
Grading is making patterns from one size to another size by increasing and decreasing measurements in certain points of the patterns.
Sample development:
Garment technician helps designers and sampling merchants in developing development samples.
Garment FIT checking and correction of patterns:
The most important task of a technician is to make patterns in such a way that it fits the model body or dress form. A technician knows where the problem lies if a garment does not fit to a dress form. S/he corrects the pattern accordingly.
Incorporate buyer’s comments on samples:
Sometimes buyer changes measurement specification and adds comments on the sample and forward changes to a supplier. All changes in pattern are done by technical department.
Take care of product design and make it production friendly
Some times designer who designs sample for bulk order, don't consider construction points related to production. On that situation, the technician takes care of those critical points to make sample production-friendly.
Fabric consumption calculation
The technical department estimates the average fabric consumption of the samples.
Marker planning
Where the factory does not have a CAD system for marker planning, cutting master makes marker manually. The technical department helps cutting master better marker planning. That saves fabric and time.
Read also: Apparel Merchandising - Roles and Responsibilities
The job description may vary from one factory to another. You can also find the Job description of a fabric and apparel pattern maker in careerplanner.com.