CAD/Escaping from IT support

[Hudson]

Sick of IT support - won't bore you all by whining about why but i've been looking at CAD work - technical drawings or 3D work perhaps, however i know very little about the field at the moment. If anyone who works in CAD and has 5 minutes, can you let me know:

- what the best way of getting in to it for someone already in a job with bills to pay, i accept there will be a fairly significant pay cut however i don't have a boat docked at Monaco so it won't be that much of a change
- What software is best to start learning? I've seen Autocad, CATIA and Spaceclaim in use at one of our clients. Autocad seems to be the popular choice.
- What are the hours like? I'm not one of these people leaving number 11's in the car park at exactly 5pm, and i'm definitely not adverse to out of hours work (installed a domain controller at a funeral home once, was there until 2am, that was morbid!) but i do have a social life to some degree and my friends all work Mon-Fri.
- In support you start out as a toilet bowl for everyone else's st, and either eventually work your way up to a point where you hate both your clients AND the people who report to you, or blow your brains out. What is the sort of career path in CAD?

Many thanks for your input.

[Crook]

Night school at your local college for learning AutoCAD. Whatever the latest release is, doesn't really matter. It's not difficult, the speed comes with knowing shortcuts later on. Other software can be job specific or beneficial to know but straight AutoCAD is the standard I would say.

Re jobs, what do you want to do? Which industry? CAD is just a tool. The most obvious (to me) are interiors in some shape or form like space planning. Joinery is technical and requires knowledge of joinery. M&E (mechaincal and electrical) in Design and Build is technical and requires knowledge of those services. Therefore many roles do require CAD skills + knowledge + qualification.

However where I currently work and other companines I have worked for we have taken on novice designers with no knowledge and trained them up so it's definitely not a closed shop with regard to college/university courses required for entry.

So in summary:

AutoCAD
Evening College course
It's not difficult as a skill
It's used in lots of different industries so pick one you are interested in although many will require a good knowledge of the field and associated experiance / qualifications

It can be varied but it can aslo be very not varied!

All the best.

[Foliage]

- what the best way of getting in to it for someone already in a job with bills to pay, i accept there will be a fairly significant pay cut however i don't have a boat docked at Monaco so it won't be that much of a change

Do you have a CAD qualification? If not you need one.

- What software is best to start learning? I've seen Autocad, CATIA and Spaceclaim in use at one of our clients. Autocad seems to be the popular choice.

any really, they are all used, it depends what area you want to work in, architecture is moving/moved to BIM which is Revit, other trades use CATIA, Microstation, AutoCAD the list really goes on.

- What are the hours like? I'm not one of these people leaving number 11's in the car park at exactly 5pm, and i'm definitely not adverse to out of hours work (installed a domain controller at a funeral home once, was there until 2am, that was morbid!) but i do have a social life to some degree and my friends all work Mon-Fri.

Depends on the role, junior draughtsman should be mon-fri 9-5 but it depends on you, I'm very much of the opinion that in a CAD role that having to do overtime is bad time management either on the part of the draughtsman or that of the project manager. We have deadlines and you need to get that st done. Ive seen some very very poor draughtsman in my time.

- In support you start out as a toilet bowl for everyone else's st, and either eventually work your way up to a point where you hate both your clients AND the people who report to you, or blow your brains out. What is the sort of career path in CAD?

Sounds about right, but if your good you can move onto become a project manager, or specialise and CAD becomes secondary to your main knowledge and expertise. But in all trades you will need qualifications, you need to be open to learning constantly, legislation changes constantly.

[joshleb]

Have you got any experience or knowledge in engineering or mechanics where CAD is used pretty heavily.

CAD course would definitely be the way to go, and a potential career path to utilise other specialist software, or add-ins for AutoCAD.

Could include tools like Autoturn for vehicle junctions, or Microdrainage used for drainage design.

Good luck!

[Hudson]

Thanks for your input, I will start looking into evening courses or similar. If it requires a full time commitment then obviously some sacrifices will need to be made.

I don't have any experience in engineering industries outside of knowing how they operate off the back of supporting their IT setups, i do have an interest in aviation and military stuff mainly because that's the area my Dad works in.

The reason i was looking at CAD is the same reason i considered Web Design/Database Analyst roles, its so i actually have something to show for my work. In support i stem the tide, perhaps get a grunt of appreciation once a month and get on to the next problem. Even the guy spitting in your big mac can look out and see someone enjoying the result of their work.

[Foliage]

http://www.stockport.ac.uk/courses-page/level-2-aw...

[Rikk]

Autodesk now does Fusion 360, combined CAD and CAM which is free to home/hobby(chargeable once used for profit/business) users so you can download it and get stuck in learning as they have a superb array of training and videos that are free as well.
With the pricing model, continuous updates and ease of use this will pretty much be the go to CAD/CAM.

http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overvi...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiMwMz3RMbW5mbx0i...

Edited by Rikk on Monday 14th November 14:31

[Fastdruid]

Rikk said:

Autodesk now does Fusion 360, combined CAD and CAM which is free to home/hobby(chargeable once used for profit/business) users so you can download it and get stuck in learning as they have a superb array of training and videos that are free as well.
With the pricing model, continuous updates and ease of use this will pretty much be the go to CAD/CAM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiMwMz3RMbW5mbx0i...

I was just going to say this. I believe that it's only chargable once you are over $100k or so as well so it's pretty much a no brainer.

I've long been a SolidWorks user but as a private user I'm using a very old copy. I'd buy a personal copy if they did such a thing but it's either Student which I don't qualify for , Corporate (which is unjustifiably pricey) or pirate bay. :/

So I'm planning on going Fusion360

[filski666]

Depends on so many things...if you want to head into the contracting field or work as a permie - Autocad is used in varied industries, but you won't get much more than £15-20 ph doing it. If you want to work in Automotive (especially OEMs) then you need CATIA/NX/IDEAS/PRO-E - for these you can be looking at anything up to £40 ph if you have engineering knowledge to add on, and not just a CAD monkey.

Getting trained is fairly easy - you can take a low role at an OEM who will train you in whatever they use, or you can pay to go on a course - however, doing a course in CAD will only teach you the basics, you won't really know how to use it till you start using it in anger, working with non-standard parts. I used to work as a CAD trainer and the course examples are carefully design to work - in the real world, they never "work" - and you have to learn many ways of getting around issues.
Also - you really need some kind of engineering knowledge behind it all, or the stuff you churn out will be mocked by people having to work with it.....

hours - as long as you like - at an OEM as a permie - can be as low as 37pw. As a contractor, the sky's the limit (I often hit 60 - 90 hours a week)

[Hudson]

filski666 said:

I used to work as a CAD trainer and the course examples are carefully design to work - in the real world, they never "work" - and you have to learn many ways of getting around issues.

exactly like Microsoft courses then! Lovely sanitized virtual environments where everything just works (even DirectAccess!)

Then you get in to the real world and your clients kit is so mismatched that you start to wonder if they stole it.


Back on topic, i get the impression now that CAD is more of a tool than a job description so i will do some more research in to the sort of fields that interest me.

Thanks to everyone for their input

[joshleb]

Good to know you're not rushing into anything.

Even though you might not like what you're currently doing, it's still money, and kind of important every month!

[snotrag]

Just to touch on something that I cant see mentioned.

CAD is a tool. Just like a Chisel is a tool for a carpenter.

Knowing how to hit a chisel does not make yourself a carpenter. Just because you know what buttons to press on a CAD system to make pretty drawings, does not make you a designer/engineer/architect etc.

Think carefully about what you want to be! Good luck.

[48Valves]

snotrag said:

Just to touch on something that I cant see mentioned.

CAD is a tool. Just like a Chisel is a tool for a carpenter.

Knowing how to hit a chisel does not make yourself a carpenter. Just because you know what buttons to press on a CAD system to make pretty drawings, does not make you a designer/engineer/architect etc.

Think carefully about what you want to be! Good luck.

I was just about to post something similar.

My 8 year old can model a pretty good house using Revit and has been able to for a couple of years. Being able to use the software is no indication that what is drawn is of any use. Although she's probably better than some of the architects I've worked with recently .

[Equus]

Crook said:

Re jobs, what do you want to do? Which industry? CAD is just a tool.

snotrag said:

CAD is a tool. Just like a Chisel is a tool for a carpenter.

Knowing how to hit a chisel does not make yourself a carpenter. Just because you know what buttons to press on a CAD system to make pretty drawings, does not make you a designer/engineer/architect etc.

This, a hundred times over!

I employ CAD monkeys (I run an architectural practice), but first and foremost they need to understand what they are drawing.

Even the ones who 'just' do the pretty pictures (ie. 3D renderings) need to know exactly how a building (in my case) goes together, otherwise they're literally worse than useless... it takes so much time and care to check their output for obvious gaffes that you might as well do it yourself.

You will need to retrain for whatever field you want to become a CAD operative in, before looking for a job. Learning to drive a CAD workstation is the easy bit.

[Bodo]

Here's an idea how to progress from IT support to CAD operator: larger industrial companies with engineering activities have support departments for CAD/CAE/CAM/PDM/PLM. Depending on company size and strategy, they have quite an amount of employees caring only to maintain the CAx environment - the one I've worked in as a student had 33 people for a total of 9000 employees, of which there were around 1200 CAx users.

Typical tasks were caring for user access, licences, software deployment, user support, training, software selection and testing, reproducing bugs, trying features and developing best practices, and so on.

Could be a rolling start for you, as you can bring some knowledge and skills, while being exposed and studying the CAD software.

[ooid]

Depends on the sectors really. Here is my take so far;

- In architecture, most CAD works being done by interns or junior designers already. Serious/interesting work actually needs "computational design" or what we would call "BIM" nowadays. You need to program/code in the CAD environment to deal with complex geometry and structural models on bigger scale buildings. (Examples; Gherkin in London, British museum roof, aquatics swimming pool and many more...). There is a new profession/niche emerged in the last few years. Small amount of intelligent people that using these softwares by tweaking codes and programming can control big infrastructural projects easily.

- In vehicle or industrial design, I think CAD alone is not enough. You also need some serious graphic and manufacturing tools to support both model-making and engineering teams.

- Visualisation/CGI, Rendering sector, mainly to do with quite hardcore computers and extremely photo-realistic visualisations and animations. There are seriously good/competitive companies out there especially in nordic countries. People in this sector have quite mixed background like fine arts, architecture or even engineering background, as precision and power/speed is important.

I would suggest a postgraduate degree on specific field with a highly dedicated teaching team for a serious career change, it would worth if you enjoy and up to it.

(I'm a designer with architectural background and had been teaching in higher education for more than 8 years now)

[lord summerisle]

ooid said:

- In architecture, most CAD works being done by interns or junior designers already. Serious/interesting work actually needs "computational design" or what we would call "BIM" nowadays. You need to program/code in the CAD environment to deal with complex geometry and structural models on bigger scale buildings. (Examples; Gherkin in London, British museum roof, aquatics swimming pool and many more...). There is a new profession/niche emerged in the last few years. Small amount of intelligent people that using these softwares by tweaking codes and programming can control big infrastructural projects easily.

Within the world of Revit - there is a recent additional program that Autodesk has started shipping as a companion software called Dynamo, which allows users to code up programs to automate certain aspects of the model - with lots of custom code being written in IronPython to allow integration with other programs - from pulling data out of the revit model back and forth to excel and other AEC programs.

Dynamo can also create and compute complex geometry.

Going off the announcements at last week's Autodesk University with the tech. preview of Project Quatum - those with a coding background are going to be very sort after in the next few years as the industry seeks ways of integrating different software via some thing like Project Quatum where Autodesk will be allowing users to build their own programs within the framework to push data between different programs without having to through a tedious and data-losing file conversion process.