Autodesk Inventor Aptitude Screening
Do you need Inventor aptitude screening for your employees?
In almost every case, the answer is yes. Most companies have no one in a managerial position with any true Inventor aptitude. Most likely there are a guy or two with some SolidWorks experience –which is NOT a plus, and likely there is a core group that received some training from their reseller. Unless the training was very intensive and was done while actually working in Inventor on a daily basis, chances are good that some bad practices are now an everyday part of your new design schema. Bad practices and/or poor modeling skills not only leads to an on-going loss of productivity, it can also lead to catastrophic events that can very well endanger your companies very existence.
Pre-Employment Screening for Autodesk Inventor Aptitude
How we perform an Autodesk Inventor Aptitude Screen
We feel the best way to perform an Inventor aptitude screen is to have a good long conversation with the prospective employee (usually by phone) that covers their training, modeling techniques, ideas on best practices, and a host of other variables to arrive at a “feel” for the prospective employee’s fit for the particular job description at your company –not a generic company. There is no test that can do this, it is an interactive process that has real-time variables that are beyond the scope of “one size fits all” tests.
Inventor Aptitude Screen – Case Study 1:
We were contacted by the Director of Design at a prestigious yacht building company back in 2005 about the Inventor aptitude of a prospective employee. They were having a hard time filling a position, so when a resume came around for a person who claimed “ten years experience with Autodesk Inventor”, the resume obviously got their attention.
It turned out that the person had NO Inventor experience beyond working with a free trial for a couple weeks –he claimed ten years of experience because Inventor was at version ten at the time, and took a guess that it was at least ten years old. The program was only five years old. He lied, but would have easily bluffed his way into the company had the company not taken the initiative to consult with ADI.
The above company would have lost a great deal of time and money had they hired this person, but in this case the deception was spotted pretty much instantly. We don’t research experience claims, we decipher them. Even someone with a valid claim of “ten years of experience” may know absolutely nothing beyond what they learned to get their particular job done ten years ago.
Contact us today to arrange for an Autodesk Inventor Aptitude Screen for your potential hires. We’re ready to help!
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Post Employment Screening for Autodesk Inventor Aptitude
Assessing Inventor Aptitude in the current workforce
A far more common situation would be where current or potential employees have actual Inventor experience –but have bad habits, a poor understanding of parametric modeling, or worse –they just don’t “get it”. Believe it or not, there are a great many designers out there that treat parametric sketching the same way they sketched in 2D. No constraints beyond those applied automatically, no parameters, no design intent. They are basically treating Inventor as a platform for creating dumb 3D solids. The problem is, to the casual observer, there may not be any outward indication that anything is wrong!
Inventor Aptitude Screen – Case Study 2:
We were recently contracted by a company to examine a model that they created that was behaving very badly. It was a medium sized assembly created in-house that had some iLogic configuration capabilities. The problem was that when a width configuration was set above a certain threshold, the model would self-destruct! They could not figure out what was going on, and they had to shift scarce resources to manually design what was supposed to be an automated process. The lead designer was adamant in his assessment that Inventor had a bug that was causing the problem, but it turned out that it was incredibly poor modeling practices by the lead designer himself that had caused the problem. When you add poor modeling practices and design automation together, very bad things can, and will likely happen.
Inventor Aptitude Screen – Case Study 3:
A designer worked for nearly five months on a project. The model he was working on started taking forever to open, crashed quite a bit, and, at times, the model would “explode”. He blamed the problems on Inventor –yet others in the company were having no problems. Upon investigation, we found that this designer created all of his own screws, bolts, nuts, washers, etc. Everything. Which explained some of the extra time –and why the model had gotten so bloated. He created all of the hardware with actual modeled threads which were consuming enormous system resources. Beyond the system resource problem, all of the hardware was already available in simplified versions within Content Center. In the end, the design was scrapped because it was overly complicated to start with. Over six months of man-hours with a lot of overtime were lost!
If you believe that the stock reseller training you gave your employees has given them the skill set they need to perform optimally with Inventor, you are woefully mistaken. In all of the above cases, the employee’s had reseller training –in one case, many weeks of training. In reality, it takes several years of continuous use by someone who seeks out knowledge to become proficient in Inventor. Anything less requires a checking.
To rest assured you have no ‘ticking time bombs” –employees that are underperforming or have the potential to cause catastrophic failure in your precious parametric models, contact us today to set up your Inventor Aptitude screenings.
