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Hiring Someone With SolidWorks Experience. What Would You Do?

Published
by
Josh
on October 12, 2007
in Business
.

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plastic-chips-and-ham.jpgSo, I’m wondering what you would do. Is it better to hire someone with SolidWorks experience and teach them the industry, or someone with industry experience and teach them SolidWorks?

That is the question. Sometimes you don’t get both, so what do you think would work best?

image: TurboForce3D

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Viewing 12 Comments

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    I would hire someone who knew the industry and Pro/E. After you teach them SolidWorks and they see how easy it is to use, they will feel they are in your debt for life : )
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    Well, let me be an age-ist. If someone is young and computer savvy, learning new software should be a piece of cake. Going from 2D to 3D mentality can take a little while for anyone, but even that can't be too difficult, eh?
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    I will hire a person who has the qualities that I want. They will acquire the necessary skills in short order.
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    We are currently trying this experiment. Since we had a hard time finding anyone with SolidWorks and any required industry experience, we decided to hire SW people and teach them the industry. The other way was frustrating, as the learning curve was longer to teach a software package than it was to meter out bits of a project and give the SW person a direction to head.
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    I work with sheetmetal, and we manufacture all kinds of products for big companies in the electronics industry. We do alot of developing for our customers ourselves but we also get all ready made drawings and 3d-models. And you wouldn´t belive some of the stuff i see. Sometimes i wonder if people even have seen any kind of manufacturing at all. I have to re do alot of stuff all the time and its kind of frustrating you know. So therefore i would definetly choose someone with experience from the industry.
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    wow guys, these are all incredible experiences. I think it shows that one or the other isn't always the deciding factor. The ability to learn/take direction is huge. Being able to adapt is important. Those are things that can't be measured, but you get a sense from their experience and attitude. We give our prospects a short test that evaluates solidworks and mech engineering aptitude. It's a simple 5 questions, but helps establish competency.
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    We run into some of the same issues, and with Cobalt being a boat manufacturer in the middle of the country sometimes it can be difficult to find a readily available pool of talent with industry experience.

    It's much easier to teach a software package in my opinion, than to "teach" someone the culture of our business. That's something that they need to grow into whether they have previous experience or not.
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    Dustin, I'd have to lean toward the industry experience side too, exactly because of what you say about the "culture" of the business. As long as they are capable, picking up the CAD methodology should be easier. Usually the methodology is different anyway right?
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    Too right about different methods. Our company CAD standards for instance are completely backwards from most traditional methods in regards to scaling, plotting, etc, but it seems to work for us. When someone with CAD experience comes in they often go "..." because nearly everyone in our Engineering department has been self taught and basically standardized the exceptions over the decades.

    As we look at moving from AutoCAD to SolidWorks we're having to rethink the way we do a lot of things, but as with any kind of change there's a period of adjustment.

    Even with our quirky standards, it's nothing that someone with any amount of aptitude can't adjust to in a week or two, or start on from scratch and be productive inside a month. To get an instinctive feel for what we expect out of our products, and our associates... that can take years before it really clicks with someone, and quite honestly many many people wash out before they ever have that epiphany.
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    At the job I'm currently at, I was hired specifically because of my SolidWorks skills. The reason being that the person I replaced had horrible CAD skills, and just caused headaches, mass confusion, and mayhem. To this day, I still get the rolling eyes and shaking heads when I mention this person's name to vendors, suppliers, and others within our own organization. If you can't effectively use the tools to communicate design and intent, then it's not going to matter much how well you understand the "culture"

    In fact, I love how so many companies say they're looking for people who are "flexible, forward-thinking, adaptable, open-minded, open to change, have a fresh perspective, blah, blah, blah..." and then frown upon the fact that you haven't work at one company for over 10 years, because they want you to stay there for 30. People who have been at a company for many years are some of the most in-flexible, stuck-in-the-past, closed-minded, resistant-to-change people I've ever met. Not all, of course, but many. They have the least amount of drive, and have given up trying to push themselves and be better. All because they've accepted and embraced "the way we do things around here". Heck I even find myself falling into that trap sometimes; it's human nature. I'm not at all dismissing the value of industry experience, but I think someone's drive and passion are better indicators of how much they will contribute to a company than how long they've been dealing with a certain industry.
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    Bruce, man, super good points. A lot of what you say is exactly what I'm against. The "most in-flexible, stuck-in-the-past, closed-minded, resistant-to-change people I’ve ever met." I'm in aircraft completions and for that reason I'd prefer someone with some knowledge of the culture as Dustin stated, but the last 4 people we've hired are fresh to the industry and great at SolidWorks. That's why I think this is such an interesting question. You'll want to go one way and get flooded with talent the other. At the end of the day, if I need a senior engineer I would prefer someone with industry experience. For anything else I'd base it on what you're getting at. you can't beat someone with new ideas with passion and drive.

    Thanks for the great rebuttal!
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    We've had both go through our office. The ones that seemed to last, however, were the ones who understood SolidWorks really well, and had a basic understanding of the industry. It was a lot easier for me to say, "Here's a template, use these tolerance-stackups/parameters, and call me when it's done. It is much easier to nudge them back on track when they don't completely know the industry; but it's a pain in the ass fixing problems for them (or answering the 9-million questions) when they don't understand SW.

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