CADDManager on February 21st, 2006

It is very hard to maintain a consistent level of expertise in your users ability to use CAD. You should be constantly seeking to have a fairly consistent understanding of your CAD tools by all of your users.

There will obviously be those in your firm who are superstars in CAD. These users should be encouraged to improve and experiment and test new concepts. But they are usually about 5-10% of your users.

There will also be the tech stragglers who cannot keep up and are using AutoCAD like it was still Release 10. These folks need to be move ahead in their thinking and use of the tools.

What I want to discuss is how these differing levels of expertise actually handcuff some of your efforts, limit your capabilities and derail your efforts to make progress.

Here is a brief list of some of the areas that may be undermined by having a gap that is too wide between your best user and your worst.

  1. The expert users will be frustrated because they have to slow down and use CAD at a lower level than they want to.
  2. Slow users will be frustrated trying to understand and keep up with advanced users? constant pushing the tools to the cutting edge.
  3. Differing levels of expertise create files that are a confusion of standards. You end up with high end entities created by advanced users that are often exploded down to their base units by lagging users. This creates a confusing mixture of entities that are often corrupted in the process.
  4. Advanced users often set up projects differently than lagging users. This creates a twisted mixture of file names, drawing content, settings, configurations and more.

Can you think of any more?

2 Responses to “How differing levels of CAD expertise infect your files”

  1. All drafters only want to work on the projects set up by the expert drafters because those drawings are “clean”. Resentment builds when the expert drafters have to clean up the dirty drawings.

  2. Most here don’t even care either way. It is a line or a circle and shove it till it fits. Making cad here difficult. So I try to push the standards via email as well as direct communication and hard copies (which most never read).

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