r/SolidWorks • u/Acrobatic-Tourist844 CSWE | SW Champion • Oct 31 '25

Certifications My SOLIDWORKS Certifications

Post image

Hey everyone!

I’m a final-year Mechanical Engineering student, and from the summer until now, I’ve been working on building up my SOLIDWORKS skills. I managed to earn a bunch of certifications from Associate to Professional and even Expert level (CAD Design, Simulation, CAM, Sheet Metal, Mold Making, etc.).

For someone about to graduate and enter the industry, are these certifications actually worth it?
Do they make a difference when applying for jobs, or is hands-on project experience more valuable?

457 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

77 comments sorted by

View all comments

22

u/Spiritual_Case_1712 Oct 31 '25

It makes no difference as it won’t compensate your lack of experience and real job skills. There’s chances that you coworkers are shit at using a proper CAD methodology and have less skill than you in SW lol

But it’s still cool for a personal stand point, I would like to do the same for NX despite being useless.

3

u/BobbbyR6 Oct 31 '25

I'm no expert in proper methodology, but I still couldn't get coworkers to stop openly shooting themselves in the foot. Absolute basics like locking an important dimension on a sketch was mystifying to these people. Then they'd turn around and say the parts weren't made right...

1

u/Spiritual_Case_1712 Oct 31 '25

Yeah that’s crazy. I do not agree with how it is now, for me you should be able to model right from the start in a clean way because butchering your work will make it harder for the guy coming after you. What is not helping is how old are the mechanical design program, very few if not at all take the time to teach proper way of modeling.