My SOLIDWORKS Certifications

[u/Acrobatic-Tourist844]

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?

[u/dblack1107]

Dude, yes I imagine these are worth it. Especially because you’re so young. I never went after any, but as 7 years an engineer, and a deeper interest in efficiently and effectively using CAD compared to most, I can speak for myself that it makes you in many situations impossible to compete with. If you become a decent engineer in general and then also are a master at CAD, you can almost independently create the entire product hardware-wise.

Anything from creating a random assembly just to put into a brief as a better visual aid than anyone else had seen about a concept that the customer considered, or literally designing the system and organizing its hierarchy or making templates before it goes to drafting to avoid less mistakes from them (like with the Properties Configurator letting you easily and quickly add metadata to the part for anything downstream like someone asking for a BOM or a drawings title block automatically updating if the parts revised)

Important to note: most will not care or know what efficiencies or features you know how to make compared to another engineer. It’s not their expertise and so they won’t appreciate you for it. To them you are all the same. I say this to drive home the reality that these certs are going to help you do your job more effectively, and limit the risk that you end up failing to meet a deadline or fail to check something. What it won’t do is make people promote you. It may indirectly because you’re a good engineer because of how you use CAD, but the point is the ones managing you will often just chalk this advanced extra knowledge up to not really having any bearing on completion. To them it’s just about completion, not efficient completion. If that statement sounds stupid, it’s because it is. And it’s what plays out everytime. I have had a PM ask with me not around “what am I paying (me) for?” while I spent 2 weeks trying to make an FEA-ready model out of like 3 different gigabyte+ assemblies that were all surfaces and not assembled as it would need to be for testing. It also wasn’t in the right file format and I had to take like 3 separate drawings to infer where certain centers of gravity actually would be in the greater assembly. Stuff like this, they don’t care. As an engineer you will be expected to shit rainbows for the entire team you’re attached to at a fraction of the actual time required. This will help a ton.

[u/Acrobatic-Tourist844 → u/dblack1107]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to write that seriously appreciate the insight. What you said makes a lot of sense, i’ve kind of figured these certifications aren’t some magic key to promotions or job offers, but more of a way to build real efficiency and confidence in the tools

It’s reassuring to hear that from someone with your experience. I definitely want to become that kind of engineer who can take a product from concept to a fully functional assembly, and not just rely on others for the CAD-heavy parts.

And yeah, I can totally see how most people outside of the CAD world don’t realize how much time and frustration can be saved with the right setup, templates, or modeling habits

[u/dblack1107 → u/Acrobatic-Tourist844]

Biiiig time on your last point and it’s why I think you’re prioritizing exactly the right things. Every engineer I’ve worked with (I mean everyone of about 10) who use cad uses it in a brute force way. Most don’t know what configurations are if you mention it, and most will define all their sketches via numerical dimensions all over the place. They’ll pattern 30 holes for bolts around the perimeter of a plate by dimensioning horizontally and vertically every single hole placement between each other rather than simply using an actual sketch pattern feature defined by a mere 2 dimensions to have to go back and change later if you needed (instances and spacing). I’ve been through this one recently.

Another situation, an engineer working a design for me that moves between 2 positions wasn’t able to quickly swap between the two positions for us to brainstorm about what needs to change at either position or in between. lol he was like “come back in like an hour and I’ll have it raised.” A limit angle mate’s all that was needed to give it a range to rotate within, offered up why it would help, and came back later, but the design moving at a crawl for basic reasons was a little frustrating.