Drafting Design

Edwards Finance > CAD Drafting

Q. I am recently enrolled at ITT. I am having to answer some questions and I hoped ya'll could help me out. I greatly appreciate it if you could answer some of the following questions. What types of careers are there for draftsmen? What are there qualifications needed? What are some objects draftsmen draft that people don't really pay attention to? What are your predictions for future draftsmen, for ex. what will they design, who will design it, etc... In your opinion, what field of draftsmen earn more money? In your opinion, what field's work is more interesting? I'm interesting in pipe drafting, is it a good paying and interesting field?

A. In what discipline(s). It's my rather unscientific observation that the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) discipline pays the least while high end mechanical (3D solids modeling) pays the most. If I'm wrong I'm sure I'll hear about it (g). As for careers, about anything that's built or manufactured needs to be designed and drawn up in one fashion or another. The neat thing about mechanical and other disciplines than AEC is more and more the work is being sent directly from the design department to the fabrication shop in digital format. The digital models are used to drive the machinery that produces the product. That's exciting. In my field, AEC, I'd suggest you spend some time working in construction building a house or on a project of the kind you would expect to be drafting on. Like commercial buildings, etc. The reason I say that is it would be superior training to be on the 'receiving' end of drawings while at the same time being expected to figure out how to create the physical manifestion of someones design .... uh ... fantasy. There's not nearly enough of that kind of practical experience in my view. As for the actual qualifications for a CAD drafting career, again, I believe it depends to a greater or lesser degree on the discipline. If you're the architect, you'd probably say dimensions. If you're the contractor, you'd probably say dimensions. In the former case, the contractor seems to go about his/her business without any regard to the design intent; in the latter case, the dimensions aren't relavent to the structure in the first place. But seriously ... Over hatching a drawing is a tremendous waste of printer ink, really obscures the more important text and dimensional information rather than making the drawing easier to read. Just as with the definition of beauty: that to which nothing can added or subtracted to make it more beautiful. A good drawing contains just the information necessary to communicate the intent thereof and no more. Draftspeople will persist in some professions and disciplines but in others, the designers will eventually take over the role of documenting their designs. As it should be in my opinion. Asking what they will design is pretty open ended ... as is the case now and as mentioned above, anything and everything that's built or manufactured needs, at some point, to be drawn in one way or the other. I can only take a wild guess but I'd suspect the automotive industry pays the best. Plus they have more fun. Blacksmithing. Frankly at this stage of the game I'm becoming rather cynical about the whole CAD thing. In my perspective there needs to be a general turnaround (in the AEC industry) with regards to what CAD does and how it's used. There needs to be a better sense of quality control in the documentation process. Perhaps a more tightly integrated method of taking design drawings through into project documentation would help. But that's another thread I suspect. I don't do pipe drafting but I do know you've got some really neat tools available. I've seen what a few people around here can do with them and it's quite impressive. If you're good and productive I suspect you could earn a decent living. But the key is being accurate as well as fast.

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