Skill Level Test

[pgastelum]

Does anyone have a drawing that can be used to as a standard to determine CAD skill levels?

[Kevin B]

If your looking to test potential employees, a technique I've used in the past is to give someone two hours worth of work to do, and only an hour do do it in. The example I like to use is to have a written description of an space, say an 12 x 14 room complete with wall types, door and window sizes/locations, finishes, fixtures, furniture etc., and then ask the candidate to produce a floor plan, elevations, wall section, rcp, furniture plan, schedules. This way I can check not only there speed, but also their attention to detail and CAD know-how (layer use, correct text sizes, etc.). I've found that is a good way to get a barometer for both CAD and industry specific skills. I hope this helps.

[pgastelum]

Thanks Kevin, but i'm really just looking for a simple test. something that will take no more than 20 minutes. It might not seem like that much time to get an idea though, what do yall think?

[madcadder]

Thanks Kevin, but i'm really just looking for a simple test. something that will take no more than 20 minutes. It might not seem like that much time to get an idea though, what do yall think?
I could send you a skeleton floor plan that we use here to test with. Is perfect for you to say, "hey, put a roof on this with a pitch of 8:12 front/back and 10:12 side/side", but it doesn't really help much if you design heat exchangers.

[pgastelum]

Sorry, forgot to mention that we don't do much architecture. it is mostly development plans and landscape architecture.

[Wanderer]

Does anyone have a drawing that can be used to as a standard to determine CAD skill levels?
I have no idea what they did with the test they used on me (printed description of setting up a drawing, drawing object, inserting it as an xref in model and then inserting their tb in pspace)

but, I do recall quite a bit of discussion on testing in the cad managers newsgroup (http://discussion.autodesk.com/search.jspa?numResults=25&inputEntered=true&source=viewforum%7C112&q=test&objID=f112)on autodesk.

good luck. :)

[jaberwok]

Sorry, forgot to mention that we don't do much architecture. it is mostly development plans and landscape architecture.

Your company requirements are unique. So are the requirements of every other company.
Why not give the candidate hard copy of one of your drawings and a template file and ask him/her to make a start at reproducing the drawing?

[Ammon]

Your company requirements are unique. So are the requirements of every other company.
Why not give the candidate hard copy of one of your drawings and a template file and ask him/her to make a start at reproducing the drawing?
That sounds closest to what my last place of employment did. They also had a multiple choice CAD trivia test. It asked about what commands are used to do common tasks associated with our industry.