What exactly is taught in current drafting classes?

[ktouton]

I have been teaching drafting at a Technical College for 10 years. I also struggle getting 3 local employers to meet with me twice a year. We feed them either breakfast or lunch and the meeting lasts about an hour. More often than not I cannot find 3 people willing to attend. This is the PERFECT time for employers to tell the schools what the students are missing.

I am struggling with enrollment. As stated above, many engineers and architects are doing their own drafting. If students cannot find job postings why would they go into that field. Most job boards have plenty of jobs in the medical field. My school's population is about 45% in the medical fields.

My classes are 15 weeks. We meet for 6 hours a week. I have contacted employers to get prints of things their company has designed either for my mechanical students or my architectural students. I get nothing. My students get bored drawing something they have no idea what it is. I would love to have some of the first drawings my students create be used in their assembly drawing class. You close the loop that way. They will finally see how things go together.

If anyone would like to share drawings with me I will take them. These do not have to be current designs. These designs will not be used to create products or be sold.

If you feel the students do not meet your employment needs talk to the local college. See what can be changed and help them change it. If they are meeting your employment needs then talk to the college and let them know. Both are needed to keep a dwindling program alive.

[a.a.sharp422270]

As a recent grad of an Architectural Graphics degree I would have to say the majority of my cad training was in drawing tools and mechanical parts and not in architectural drafting skills and practices. All my major design/draw assignments were done in Revit. One class was done on the board but was more about line weights and perspective. Unfortunately the classes that would have taken us deeper into good drafting practices had to be cut because of the Dean of the Dept. decided that it took too units to finish the program and wanted classes cut. Revit was a solution in many ways as it takes care of alot of technical stuff that AutoCad does not. A full set of construction docs is easier to produce in Revit then AutoCad for the entry level draftsman. Unfortunately Revit is seen as the future of architectural drafting at this school so the need for in depth teaching on good drafting practices falls behind.

[grantalucas]

Just to say that as Ktouton has stated above.... yep I do all my own drafting. I am in a practice with 3 other mature Architects and they also do the same. No young drafters and no young Architects. Why? Both graduate architects and new drafters alike are useless because it is an industry that used to be based on an apprenticeship system. College and TAFE teaching have their place to learn the basics, but it is real world on the job (and lots of them) experience that makes the gun drafter. The student often paid money to be trained in the field under the guidance of an experienced architect. It was hands on & you learned on the job. Not much different now except that you no longer have to pay to get work. Teaching a newbie on the job actually takes lots of time and that costs...plus you then have to pay a wage as well. The gun drafters have had plenty of on the job experience. They did this over 10 or more years and they didn't do it with a few months of training. You pay then 50% more than a newbie & get 500% more work output. Plus you don't have to do it again. It is just too time consuming and therefore too costly to get someone with little or no experience to do my work for me.
Problems with getting anyone else to do my job for me are manifold. They are

1: The Chinese whisper principal: When I was working in large offices as the person at the end of the line I found that I was never given the correct or full information. By the time I got the job it had been passed from Director, to Project Architect, a Junior Architect and then finally to me. Now that I am the boss, if I talk to the client I find I can usually sketch up the brief in the same time it would take me to verbally describe it to someone else and guess what? Nothing is lost in translation so it is done right first time.
2:Problem is not just the CAD skill deficit but also a lack of construction knowledge: Yep New drafters and Architects alike seem to know nothing about construction. If you don't know how it is built you will struggle to draw it.
3:A limited responsibility for the work: A holistic overview is needed to do the work right & do it right first time. Drafters are usually only are given limited responsibility & if they see something outside the small area they have been given to work on they don't do anything about it as it is someone else's problem. This then leads to more problems and more cost & yep you guessed it I end up doing the work in the end anyway.

I was lucky enough to get a start when CAD was new. There was less to know so the CAD part only took 6 months or so training myself all day every day for around 80 hours a week. I got the construction knowledge as Contract CAD workers were rare then and it was easy to get a job if you had a PC & AutoCAD & went door to door. I did contract work & never had a day out of work for 10 years. It took that long to really get the hang of the business. I then started up by myself. I know I'm lucky & my way of "passing it on" is to train up a newbie in my spare time. I cannot afford to employ them as they will cost me money. I am however willing to spend a few hours a week on emails and phone calls. My procedure is that I give my newbie the jobs I don't want. The money my newbie makes is her own to keep & I mentor with advice when needed. It has been about a year now & I reckon she is getting close to being employable. Hopefully she also will take someone on one day and "Pass it on"

[rfrye648774]

I know personally that the "talent" I have seen lately has been horrible. This is not just from kids right out of school, but also from what I would normally consider seasoned vets. As a result, part of my job of CAD Manager involves spending four hours a day, three days a week, sitting over the shoulder of all of our CAD staff... Indefinitely at that! We have a few individuals who used to, or still do teach at the local ITT here, and it is horribly scary what I have come to see. I know that my 14 years of experience does no equate to much all the times, but when we have sent all of our users off site for training, provided online training access, have luncheons nearly every week or every other at the most, people still just don't get it. Is this something that is due to folks thinking that technology and complexity of our jobs would get easier, or is it just due to the fact that they don't really care and really just want to get the Professional License and sit back and watch?

[Coloradomrg]

So...

It seems that a disconnect between what employers need/want and what colleges teach is one big hurdle. The other hurdle is finding people who don't just want a J-O-B and a bigger check than there retail job.

Maybe I'll take one of my Friday afternoons and go visit the local program directors... see if I can gain a better understanding of their curriculum.

[Iceberg]

I know personally that the "talent" I have seen lately has been horrible. This is not just from kids right out of school, but also from what I would normally consider seasoned vets. As a result, part of my job of CAD Manager involves spending four hours a day, three days a week, sitting over the shoulder of all of our CAD staff... Indefinitely at that! We have a few individuals who used to, or still do teach at the local ITT here, and it is horribly scary what I have come to see. I know that my 14 years of experience does no equate to much all the times, but when we have sent all of our users off site for training, provided online training access, have luncheons nearly every week or every other at the most, people still just don't get it. Is this something that is due to folks thinking that technology and complexity of our jobs would get easier, or is it just due to the fact that they don't really care and really just want to get the Professional License and sit back and watch?

I fell the pain. I am dealing with a similar situation myself.

[toddw.schuler]

My experience is much the same, if you hire experienced drafters, they have their own preconceived notions on standards and methods. If you hire inexperience, you are getting users who have had some CAD class and nothing more, they don't know any drafting techniques or understand the purpose of a drawing.
With Machine component drawings, the simple X,Y,Z concept is completely lost on most and when you look at their completed drawings, it is impossible to read them. I have been finding it difficult to train or retrain some of the newer candidates as they are arrogant about their "style" of work. I think they believe it is an art form and not a document.

I think part of the problem is there is nothing in high school around the technical fields as all the schools have gone to teaching to the standardized testing started more than a decade ago. At one time you would get a kid who had a taste for drafting in high school and it became an interest, some when to school for architecture or engineering while others went to technical schools where they learned drafting on the board. Then CAD came along, early on, drafting was still taught, then CAD procedures were introduced. Now, I think they just teach CAD procedures, how to start a drawing, draw lines arch and circles and save, then plot. Students never have to learn how to use the drawing.

[tedg]

I guess it depends on the school(s).
Some schools prepare you better than others.

A lot of this has been discussed here, here, and here as welll as other similar threads.

I don't know exactly what is currently being taught at my alma mater, but when I graduated, (even before I graduated), I was well prepared to take what I was taught and hit the road running with a great drafting job, and of course built on that to a great career.

IMO, the bottom line is someone expecting to do well in a drafting/design career these days should have technical experience, drafting experience (actual board-drafting too), good computer skills, have learned advanced and current CAD skills and applicable programs, have an eye for detail and know what is really needed on the drawings to build/manufacture what they are designing, follow rules and standards, check thier ego at the door, have a passion for what they do.

[cadman70454]

Taking an AutoCAD class to learn how to draft is like taking a typing class to learn how to write a novel. My degree + drafting, algebra, trig, calculus & fortran classes got my foot in the door at a wood truss factory. While knowing the basics of drafting, I really learned production drafting skills on the job. This was precalculator days, 1978, so I also honed my production math skills.

I'm in the steel detailing business and what is missing and has been since the major steel companies went down is apprenticeship programs. Most learning is done on the job but a basic skill set is necessary to be able to advance in the industry. We have hired what's considered the best drafting/AutoCAD students at the local tech schools and none have worked out. They are clueless in all things. The best results I've had is field construction guys who want to work in an air conditioned space. They take AutoCAD/drafting classes at the community college and get the most out of it. They have field construction knowledge which is 90% of the job. The drafting part tends to be a lot simpler if you know what you are drawing. I've always said that I can teach a construction veteran how to turn out a set of drawings a lot faster that I can teach an ace AutoCAD operator how everything in the world is built.

[tedg]

Taking an AutoCAD class to learn how to draft is like taking a typing class to learn how to write a novel.
.... The drafting part tends to be a lot simpler if you know what you are drawing. I've always said that I can teach a construction veteran how to turn out a set of drawings a lot faster that I can teach an ace AutoCAD operator how everything in the world is built.

Nicely put (and congrats on your first post).
That's the "technical experience" I was talking about, you need to know what you're drawing, and how it's built/made.

This applies to most drafting positions and it depends on the size of the company and kind of work they do.
If you are designing wigits, than you need to know about wigits.
If you are an architectural drafter/designer, you may not be well-versed in civil or electrical design, and that's ok.

It's even better if you can work in many disciplines, which only comes with experience and life-lessons.

I work for an A/E firm where we have many government clients that will recieve our products, which need to be in certain cad standards.
So besides needing to know about what you are designing, a good cad designer needs to be able to work with different standards, teamed with different disciplines, and be able to work with complex work-flow configurations (such as xrefs, sheet sets, etc).