Can someone explain how the programming of CAE tools is really different from the programming of games?

In most ways, there isn't going to be a BIG difference -- both are applications of real-time 3D graphics.Applications for real-time 3D graphics range from interactive games and simulations to data visualization for scientific, medical, or business uses. Movies and animations are at the upper end of what 3D graphics are used for.  Just because there aren't BIG differences, doesn't mean that the small differences aren't significant enough build and maintain a business model.  Experienced engineers know that all too often the most important proprietary trade secret a company has is the secret about how little the company actually knows, how little the difference is between the company's technology and their competitors'.



What is different between gaming systems and CAD tools is how the the application provides tools for the user of the system to interact with the data ... both the gamer and the CAD draftsmen demand real-time, realistic 3D rendering and other attributes of the system's performance as they manipulate the data   The gamer will have typically have a more advanced interface, e.g. joystick with multiple buttons, a guitar, than the CAD draftsman, and will expect sophisticated sound and animated feedback from really smart models, but they both interact with realistic geometric data.  CAD draftsmen should benefit from the sophisticated and advanced research and development of cutting edge animated movies as well as the billions that are poured into R&D and manufacturing of advanced systems for gamers.  But do they?  Relative to gaming systems and animated movies, CAD/CAM/CAE tools seem like they are following the pack ... why is this?


Why for example, isn't there a SaaS cloud-based CAD application ... is it REALLY about speed / bandwidth? I don't really buy the speed argument:: 1) if you look at the world of online multiplayer gaming, you will see that there are different ways to skin the buffering cat, 2) when companies move to cloud-based systems they have to think about internet connections, possibly even 4G wireless connections -- i.e. moving to the cloud without ensuring a reliable, redundant set of high speed internet connections would be a clear sign of someone's incompetence.  The first significant slowdown would fix that and if it happened twice, I would guess that the stupid IT guy who did not analyze the potential for this kind of failure before moving to the cloud should be given the opportunity to look for a new career.  If it happened a third time, the stupid IT guy's boss should also be given the same opportunity.  Someone has to manage the issues that come along with the exponentially-positive implications of cloud-based borderless network ... is it REALLY that tough?  The concerns about speed/bandwidth are a case where someone is worried about a problem that happened five or ten years ago ... and not realizing that there are technological fixes that can and will be put in place to overcome those concerns.  When you work in IT or CAD administration, you should learn little lessons like: your biggest worry of 2006 will not be an issue in 2011 unless YOU can't figure out how to fix it.

When we look at developments to overcome various throughput issues in computationally-intensive 3D graphics, e.g. using OpenCL to optimally allocate computing resources to GPU or CPU depending on power, data intensity of a given task, we can be pretty certain that the real reason has less and less to do with technology constraints.  I think the real reason is "cultural."  It has to do with antiquated notions / fears about the borderless network and intellectual property AND the fact that is it is the interest of CAD vendor to kindle those those fears in order to earn more from their intellectual property.  In other words, the CTOs of BIG customers are not screaming at their CIOs to get cloud-based CAD system in place because they don't know how to handle relinquishing control of their CAD data to the cloud.  As a result, CAD vendors are able to milk the dated old client-server desktop technology paradigm a little while longer while they figure out a SaaS strategy.  Eventually,  CAD vendors will also have to answer why isn't there a SaaS CAD development framework for developers of add-ons like Force for the Salesforce SaaS CRM tool ... when a startup emerges with a credible solution that forces them to confront that question ... another question that CAD vendors should have to answer is why isn't there even, a PLM/PDM tool collaborating with multiple clients using a software engineering version control system like Github?  In short, CAD vendors will eventually have to answer why they are behind the technology curve ... until then, they can sell their wares to stodgy customers who are quite as aggressive or demanding as 14-year-old gamers.

I will edit and add to this posting later  ... right now, I'd be extremely interested in your comments.

Why you need to adapt and upgrade the skills of your engineering team faster ... and faster.

Reminder:  This is another posting is not written for everyone and anyone; this entire blog is written for SolidWorks experts ... for aspiring SolidWorks Experts ... it's a blog for people who aspire to become even BETTER Certified SolidWorks Experts, to go beyond what is required to become even MORE COMPLETE Certified SolidWorks Experts by helping others to use the technology more successfully.  

Maybe you have heard that the half-life of an engineer's professional knowledge is something like five years ... actually, I think it's less, but I'm a pessimist ... what an optimistic view of a five-year half-life means, is that in five years, half of your collected knowledge and experience as an engineer is meaningless ... you don't get to pick which half matters; the half that matters is probably the part you don't like all that well ... so make sure that you like ALL of what you do, because in five years the good half will be gone.  If you stay away from an industry for 10 years -- only one quarter of your expertise will be relevant.  If you graduated as an engineer 25 years ago, only 1/32th of what you learned as an engineer is relevant ... the degree is relevant because it proved you would bull your way through some tough courses to earn a professional degree.  And, obviously the basics (math, chemistry, physics, engineering mechanics) will always be relevant ... sort of  ... it's just that you won't have to use them very often or there will be a tool that will furnish the answer for you in a fraction of the time you could find the answer back in 1982  ... for example, when's the last time that you solved a problem that involved taking a derivative of a trigonometric function?

If you want to see more evidence of what your career is worth if you don't stay current -- take a look at the price of used books that cover software or information technology ...let's assume that you found Matt Lombard's Solidworks Administration Bible very useful and you believed a copy would pay for itself.   Three months ago, the cheapest way to buy this was in Amazon's Kindle format for about $35 (i.e. not an entirely bad option since you can also use Kindle for PC / Kindle for Android); if you wanted a printed hard copy, you would have spent roughly $40 [if you include shipping].   Today, you can buy a used, still good copy of Solidworks 2010 Administration Bible for only $6.31 ... with shipping it's around $10.  The market of CAD administrators who buy books like this is telling your that the value is somewhere in the neighborhood of a third what you would have paid a few months ago ... the reason that it's probably not worth a lot more than that is the same reason that your professional knowledge as an engineer declines so rapidly.  


Generally speaking, technology moves on because new technology makes people more productive ... you can justify the upgrade in CAD systems only because the new version makes people more productive ... it doesn't work for long to upgrade just because it's cool or you want to.  In things like CAD systems, we need to think about all of the people using the system.  When your team doesn't move to the technology that can make your team more productive, you risk falling behind ... you risk being less productive than competitors who are finding ways to be more productive.  This argument is NOT about justifying an automatic annual SolidWorks upgrade -- it is about the need to keep looking for ways to improve, to keep looking for ways that will make your team more productive.

Engineering is a discipline; it is also a team sport ... it is important to continually practice, develop, hone and update the discipline of thinking like an engineer by using technology to make you and your team more productive.  Information technology, search engines and new social knowledge networking tools like VARK.com have made collected knowledge and expertise more accessible to more people AND less valuable as something that any single one engineer should hold onto.  

By extension, proprietary knowledge has become a less valuable asset to companies ... many do not recognize this; many do not recognize that the asset that is actually more valuable is much more dynamic human engineering capital and team capital  ... although many still invest in retaining proprietary knowledge; like building a security and checkout system for a library that will ready in 2011 to filled with books like the SolidWorks 2010 Administration Bible..  What many companies do not yet recognize is that they can be stingy with their proprietary knowledge if they want ...and there are legitimate arguments, like safety concerns over unauthorized use, for being careful with the release of information.  But old financial and economic reasons have changed; it is a different world.  The global community of people who want to use a companies technology will take the path of least resistance and go elsewhere if they can -- when the proprietary knowledge is no longer relevant, the value of the stingy company's franchise plummets dramatically ... want an example?  Consider why [the more affordable, yet extremely powerful] SolidWorks has a larger installed base than any other CAD tool -- why isn't the base of Pro/E larger?  Also, by not paying attention to the shift to SolidWorks, what WILL be the cost of sticking with Pro/E to the companies who have a large legacy base of Pro/E users?

Your company's core engineering competency will push you to develop your own CAD/CAE extensions

Reminder:  This posting is not written for everyone and anyone; this entire blog is written for SolidWorks experts ... for aspiring SolidWorks Experts ... for people who aspire to become even BETTER Certified SolidWorks Experts, to go beyond what is required to become even MORE COMPLETE Certified SolidWorks Experts.  

At some point it is likely that you will need to extend SolidWorks or SolidWorks Simulation to develop capability that SolidWorks doesn't yet support ... that can't be, you say.  "We only use a tenth of what SolidWorks does now -- why would we need to extend it?  And Solidworks 2011 has even more stuff that looks great, but we won't learn to use that until 2012 or 2013."  My response to that is that you will develop the capability to use more of SolidWorks -- it's a complex tool, mastery takes time, but you work at it everyday ... you'll get there.  Frankly, you will never use most of what SolidWorks does -- there are some things that will never apply all that much to what you do; after all, there isn't any tool, any capability that anyone ever uses at 100% capacity.   


But your job is not to use the bleeding edge of SolidWorks per se, your job is to solve problems for your company ... those are the R&D, cutting-edge engineering problems will take you beyond what SolidWorks [or any other off-the-shelf CAD/CAE product] does; typically, these are not drafting problems (i.e. not about depicting a complicated cam-mating problem) which SolidWorks already does ... these problems are about the edge of engineering, simulation, variation, stochastic models, phase-changes and the very edge of what you know about the behavior of your own technology.    


But in some highly-specific areas that are core to your business, you will find that you really NEED to be ahead of SolidWorks; you can't afford to wait for SolidWorks or SolidWorks Simulation to release a tool that solves your problem.  The day may never come for the SolidWorks release of what you need ... the need for your application may be too small for Dassault -- even though it is huge for you.   At that point, you will almost necessarily be in a highly specialized, unique niche area of the technology that is THE core intellectual property that can take your company past what anyone else is doing ... unless you are in one of those companies where you depend on your brand AND the most important secret about your innovations is actually how damned little you really know.  In fact, I would claim that, almost by definition, if you can operate entirely within the SolidWorks you are either in a commodity business or your company is faking innovation ... good luck with faking innovation, but it's easy to predict that commodity businesses are going to get even more competitive.  

If anyone from Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea  ... or North Dakota  ...can pick up SolidWorks and reverse engineer your designs, grok your workflows and essentially imitate what you do [and probably do some parts of it better], there will be significant and GROWING competitive pressure on your business company's model ... and your salary.

That is why ... eventually ... your company's desire for success and desire to maintain or extend it core engineering competency will push you to DEVELOP your own CAD/CAE extensions ... of course, you will rely on the "commodity" functionality that all other SolidWorks users exploit, but it will be your FOUNDATION ... not the limit of your universe.  Most companies are not there yet ... most companies develop their own tooling and manufacturing processes, but they have not really turned the corner where they develop and extend their internal engineering, R&D, test and other "knowledge work" processes.  Eventually, you will get to the point where you gather the requirements from your users and you start developing your extensions to further automate your engineering ... or you and the other engineers at your company will work for less.  Quite a lot less ... global competition will make your company less likely to compete and will impact what your company can pay you.  Also, we should remember that engineering salaries in China or India are maybe as low as only 15% or so of what those salaries are in the USA.  











NEXT... the lines between IT systems development and engineering are blurring ... in my next few blog entries I will writing about my background as software quality engineer, about process audits and about some of the crossovers and best practices that make sense for ensuring the quality of CAD models and integrity of things like properties for ensure full benefit from associativity ... things like pair programming, agile test-driven development, authenticated check-in/check-out revision control and configuration management systems for distributed development, CAD/IT administration etc

Why it is necessary to master the virtual realm of CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE

It is thirty years since I started as a freshman in Agricultural Engineering Iowa State University; I am now a crusty, old retired engineer ... but my career [up to this point] in research, turning around small companies, supply chain development, product development and launch engineering has led me to the conclusion that it is now ESPECIALLY necessary to master the virtual realm ... in no particular order of significance, the reasons to master the virtual realm are:

• To overcome complexity with automation of routine, mundane engineering computation and the use of visual tools that allow for illustration of gargantuan amounts of data. 
• To exploit the ability to experiment in the virtual realm with set-based concurrent engineering [by modeling/simulating different designs based upon deliberately-chosen sets of factors] and using parallel, competing paths to learn as much as possible, as fast possible, as early as possible BEFORE wasting time, resources on physical prototypes, BEFORE building product-intent scrap.
• To utilize these modeling tools reliance on property associativity and design re-usability to extract more value from data repositories
• To exploit these tools capabilities for DFM / DFA / DFSS / DFx, tolerance engineering, FEA/CFD simulation  to learn about issues EARLY in the product development and launch cycle. 
• To become a master of anything [including a profession like engineering], a warrior must care for, sharpen and continually develop his tools. 
• To become fluent and effective in communicating in the language of hyper-efficient, hyper-rapid, hyper-frugal product launch and development engineer ... to work efficiently with talent wherever that talent is in the world. 
• To launch better products more rapidly for less cost for people that I care about.  

Perhaps I should explain how I came to this conclusion ...

Nobody should monkey around with stuff because it is cool ... praying to God and trying to be more like Jesus is cool; spending time with people who need you is cool; trying to fathom the beauties of God's creation and being a steward of nature is cool ... even though mastering the use of computer-aided design (CAD) packages like SolidWorks or Pro/E, computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) packages like MasterCAM or SolidCAM, computer-aided inspection (CAI) like PC-DMIS or PolyWorks, computer-aided engineering (CAE) packages for a variety of finite-element analysis (FEA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems like SolidWorks Simulation or ANSYS Fluent or Matlab/Simulink is definitely cool.  Mastering the all of the facets of virtual realm of CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE is definitely cool WHEN YOU GET TO THE POINT WHERE YOU CAN HELP PEOPLE ... but until you get to that level of mastery, the software packages are costly fritterware or just more junk that you are trying to make into something productive. 


What is FRITTERWARE, you ask?  Before you attain mastery of these tools, you will need to commit to significant investment of time because the complexity of these packages will fritter away an enormous amount of your time while you are trying desparately to use them to do something productive.   If you want to persevere through the difficulties of mastering this range of different tools ...AND as an expert, you also will want to learn how the different technicians, draftsmen, engineers [that you are trying to assist/lead] can collaborate more effectively using the tools together ... if you want to persevere in the dark/frustrating hours where everyone is screaming to make the stuff work NOW, you need to remember WHY mastering the virtual realm is so important in the first place!

Mastering the virtual realm is about significant, exponential growth in SPEED and PRODUCTIVITY, more specifically mastering the virtual realm is about the speed and productivity of product development and launch teams.  It's about improving the speed and productivity of what engineers do ... which can be a slightly itchy subject because engineers are used to improving the speed and productivity of other people do.  Worst of all, mastering the virtual realm involves getting the commitment of an engineering manager ... typically an engineer with 15 or 20 years of experience and, more importantly, a record of demonstrated effectiveness as an engineer ...  engineering managers did not come of age having the affordable power of today's CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE tools available to them.  They may have wanted tools like these, they may have dreamt of the day they'd have tools that actually performed like software vendors promised ... the fact of the matter is that highly affordable, extremely powerful CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE tools were simply not available until very, very recently.  Some engineering managers can adapt and will support a program leading to rapid mastery of the virtual realm; other engineering managers can't adapt or won't adapt -- the engineering managers who can't or won't adapt WILL sink their companies.

The reason that quickly mastering these tools is important is HUGE shift in where engineering talent is located now.  The MOST exciting developments in development and launch engineering are coming from India and China where YOUNGER, LESS EXPERIENCED, MORE PROGRESSIVE engineering managers have budgets sufficient to equipment armies of young engineers with these powerful tools to engage in FRUGAL development.  In other words, mastering the virtual realm is not only about mastering these tools within your company ... it is ALSO about becoming fluent enough in the language CAD / CAM / CAI / CAE tools in order to access a talent pool from around the globe ... offshoring is no longer just about components, tools and dies made in India or China ... offshoring is now about using engineering talent from whereever it is on the planet to be faster and more productive.

It is necessary to master the virtual realm in order to speak the language of hyper-efficient, hyper-rapid, hyper-frugal product launch and development.  If you don't speak the language in that new world ... you can't go anywhere, you can't eat anything, you can't even use the restroom ... you had better stay home where it's safe, except that, if you are launching and developing new products, you can't go home again! 

My own path to mastering this virtual realm might not be what one would predict ... twentysome years ago, I was trying to learn everything about statistics that I could so that I could more efficiently design experiments that could be completed more rapidly with fewer resources ... in the 90's I was trying to get small manufacturers to educate their employees about things like GDT and to develop consistent processes so that they could establish the foundation of continuous improvement and become leaner ... for the last decade, I've been trying to get product development teams in larger companies to avoid designing in complexity or to avoid sloppy engineering that resulted in the need to fight fires, inspect-in quality.   I haven't abandoned any of these skills; I haven't abandoned my commitment to lean, continuous improvement; I believe in the need for aggressively working to constantly simplify more than ever.

Language, linguistics, practice, extending the language, metaphors, etc

The text [to the left of this paragraph] has me thinking about what is the optimal way to learn a language ... or, as a CSWE, what would be the smartest, fastest, generally best way to make a team of people that will be collaborating on product development more proficient in a new language that I want them to share?  After all, at it's core, SolidWorks is nothing more than a language for expressing ideas, right?  But, that's  exactly what's so tough about it -- language is not just about thinking ... it's about thinking about how other people will be thinking about ideas that they haven't yet contemplated and certainly haven't tried to express ...I need to think about language, because language is what makes humans so devastatingly effective as a species

If you can develop a group that is even incrementally better at communicating/collaborating, then that group will be GEOMETRICALLY better at developing products.  It's not simply about just getting on the same page so that skills are additive, it is about getting inside each other's heads so that the product of skills goes beyond being additive or even multiplicative and becomes exponential.  Many product development efforts suck because no one in management understands the importance of building engineering communication -- one of the ways to do that is to ensure that the team is not only CAD-enabled, but CAD-literate ... your job as a CSWE is rapidly develop and extend proficiency in others to the point of where their CAD literacy reaches the "power-user" level.  Product development is about ideas ... stories, jokes, metaphors, plays, novels, films.  Managing product development is about managing culture -- it is not about managing humans, per se, but managing things like the group's development of language proficiency because language proficiency determines whether you develop from an advanced culture of renaissance thinkers that come up with the plays, sculptures and flying machines OR you develop from from trailer park full of beer-swilling coach-potatoes that just watch and or maybe try to find their stash and old bong.  

If I have an idea with any degree of complication, I will certainly need to tell a story, i.e. use an animation to describe how components of the assembly fit together and possible function mechanical [if the parts move].  The old way is just take a sketch of an idea out to the shop ... use bandsaw, grinder, drill, machining center, lathe, welder, glue gun, duct tape, modeling clay and assemble it to see if it might work ... great in the old days, but that just takes way too much time now ... I will still want to build a real prototype, of course ... but time in the shop is extremely valuable and progress is slow; CAD software and workstations are more affordable than ever ... so it's time to THINK DIFFERENTLY because you have different feasible possibilities now.   Using SolidWorks [or other similar CAD systems] I will likely want to analyze different variation on the theme of similar ideas with different simulations ... so before I even share my idea with others before we narrow our selection of what to build, I need to express a relatively RICHLY DEVELOPED idea in CAD.

Expressing richly developed ideas for the first time is not that easy ... it can be very frustrating, so people learning the language need to keep their expectations in check.   Shakespeare's first words were probably something like "mama!" or "poopoo!" but those first words were a start.  Taking it further one step at a time is what determines the ultimate value of your work. Shakespeare's deeper philosophical stuff like "To be or not to be, that is the question" didn't find their way onto the page until a few years later ... and maybe, those lines really belong to one of his collaborators ... the lesson is that if you do you stuff well, people will be riffing on your better ideas for a thousand years [and you might get more credit than you deserve].  

After you accumulate the skills in the language and develop [or steal] a library of good ideas as templates, prototyping in CAD is LOT, LOT, LOT faster than building something in the shop ... it get's even faster if you can collaborate with others who have a strong command of the language ALSO.  THAT is why I am thinking about the even better ways to rapidly make others proficient in the language.   SolidWorks is not a simple language, because the ideas that are expressed are reasonably complex.

Consider even a simple exercise [from the first chapter of the text] like making a flat bar with a pattern of holes from an aluminum alloy ... the hole pattern might be part of a mating assembly, so you need to assume that it is going to be important -- you need to develop good habits from the start to get the "obviously unimportant" details right because some day those details will matter and the associativity property of models will penalize you severely if you learn to take the easy way out and skip double-checking the details.  Also, the material properties could affect a simulation, so they need to be doublechecked.  If you are going to do useful things with this flat bar, you have to be very careful ... it's not just a simple CAD exercise, CAD is about ideas and ideas matter more than ever!

Designing big, integrative thinking, building to think

Design should be a human-centered, integrative thinking process that is more than simple ergonomics or selecting the best choice from a library of available alternatives.  It is about stretching the design to balance what humans need with what is feasible.  Building in order to think to explores what is feasible; one of the most rapid and affordable ways to prototype and work collaboratively is to build prototypes with CAD/CAM technology.  Different prototypical approaches are essential to thinking big, because thinking big is about divergence and and an expansive view that keeps its focus on the human need, rather than on features of existing products.  Creating new choices makes it possible to select better alternative approaches along the route to developing systems that can have a bigger impact.  Design is not about putting new knobs or a new polished face on an existing design.

How would you develop a better Certified Solid Works Associate (CSWA) Examination Guide?

As a CSWE, you really need to think about things like making sure that the people who look up to you can readily pass the CSWA exam on their first attempt.  Leadership is about moving other people forward toward their goals.  That means that beyond helping the newbies earn their CSWA, you need to be continually developing disciples that could replace you ... spend most of your time developing people who will develop others.  (If you are worried about developing a competitor, you might have your CWSE but you are probably NOT really durable CWSE material.  If you can't develop new people ... and lead your lieutenants to develop others ... you aren't going to rise much further ... and you are going to be stuck forever doing the one little task that someone has found that you can do.  If you like being stuck, you REALLY don't need to pay attention to any blog that is going to push you to get better...)

In reality, there probably isn't a better guide for people who are brand new to SolidWorks -- if there is, I would love to hear about it.   The ratings on Amazon are generally about as favorable as they could be for any text; the only bad reviews refer to poor proofreading and spellchecking errors which are a bit picky for a guide of this nature.  After all little bit of rushing might be expected from an affordable, highly useful current exam guide that attempts to serve a relatively small market that is interested in a rapidly evolving body of knowledge.  (Congratulations, fussbudgets!  You get two big stars on your Amazon book rating report card for pointing out the proofreading and spelling errors as the worst thing that you can find.  Hooray for you!  Your attention to detail and critical comments were very helpful to me ... perhaps not in the way you intended it.)

You are probably going to need to buy this book yourself OR join/form a SWUG where someone has something like this in their personal library.  If you are in a large company, my guess is that your upper management is scared shitless by the bad economy and is working hyper-diligently to hoard cash.  You probably will not find any support whatsoever these days for any budget that involves spending money on training guides that improve the capabilities of people. In fact, it's likely that after the various reductions in force of the last several years, you are doing the job of three people -- which basically means that you probably can't do any more than hunker down and put out fires.  As soon as you have a bit of spare time, you might find that you are assigned to develop someone else's empire ... this is fine and dandy if you fighting for a general that is going to win the war ... but it won't do, if your job is not that creative and your assignment is not more inspired than something like "march toward the sound of cannons."  

The kind of leadership that we find in most corporations is not about leadership or developing associates ... it is entirely driven by emotions -- even when the arguments are data-driven, the data is slanted for an emotional point of view that someone clinging to power desparately wants to make.  Leadership in most corporations has nothing whatsoever to eliminating fear, developing associates and real leadership -- bad leadership feeds people into a stress meatgrinder, worse, it is living on the accomplishments of past decades.  Because of this, corporate chieftains hoard cash and avoid investing in people because they know that THEIR STRATEGY IS NOT WORKING AT ALL AND THEY ARE GOING TO BADLY LOSE THE WAR WITH THEIR COMPETION from places like Shanghai, Bangalore or Sao Paulo!

In times like these, you are much better off working for yourself ... working to make your health better; working to improve the relationships with your family, friends, colleagues; working to build yourself professionally ... working to build your primary assets; working to develop your network of professionals ... working to provide better leadership and develop other people ... the little things that you do to build capabilities in others matter ... it's a tough competitive world out there, so don't just sit on your CSWE, become a better CSWE -- develop SolidWorks newbies into CSWAs, develop CSWAs into CSWPs, develop CSWPs into CSWEs.

OK, let's say that you wanted to work toward becoming a Certified Solidworks Expert ...

You will probably want to join a SolidWorks Users Group (SWUG) and start contributing as soon as possible ... here's why:

If you  have a serious interest in SolidWorks and are not already a Certified Solidworks Expert (CSWE), you might find it very advantageous to your personal and professional satisfaction to begin a personal education project of working toward earning the CSWE credential ... so that you can be appropriately recognized by colleagues, employers, customers and clients as being a "go to" person when it comes to anything about SolidWorks, parametric modeling and virtual development.  In order to do this, you will need to pass the CSWE exam which features hands-on challenges in some of these areas:

• Lofts
• Sweeps
• In-context assembly changes
• Imported part modification
• Belts and chains
• Sketch blocks
• Multi-bodies
• In-context assembly design
• Sketch pictures
• Spring modeling
• Move/Copy bodies
• Split tool

But before, you can even qualify to take the CSWE exam, a candidate must have:

• Successfully passed the Certified Solidworks Professional (CSWP) exam. A CSWP is an individual that has successfully passed our advanced skills examination. Each CSWP has proven their ability to design and analyze parametric parts and moveable assemblies using a variety of complex features in SolidWorks.
• Successfully passed at least three CWSP advanced topic exams; the advanced topics currently available are: Sheet Metal, Weldments, Surfacing, Mold Tools, Finite Element Analysis (FEA).

So before you can think about earning the CSWE, you will need to pass the CSWP exam. The CSWP exam features hands-on challenges in these three segments:

Segment 1: (90 Minutes)

• Create a part from a drawing
• Use linked dimensions and equations to aid in modeling
• Use of equations to relate dimensions
• Update of parameters and dimension sizes
• Mass property analysis
• Modification of geometry on initial part to create a more complex part

Segment 2: (40 Minutes)

• Creating configurations from other configurations
• Changing configurations
• Mass properties
• Changing features of an existing SolidWorks part

Segment 3: (80 Minutes)

• Creating an assembly
• Adding parts to an assembly
• Doing collision detection when moving a part in an assembly
• Mates
• Replacing a part with another part in an assembly
• Creating a coordinate system
• Using a coordinate system to perform mass properties analysis

Standard SolidWorks tools that may be covered in the exam include:

• Sketch entities - lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, ellipses, centerlines
• Sketch tools - offset, convert, trim
• Sketch relations
• Boss and cut features - extrudes, revolves, sweeps, lofts
• Fillets and chamfers
• Draft
• Shell
• Hole Wizard
• Linear, circular and fill patterns
• Linked dimensions
• Equations
• Mirror
• Dimensions
• Feature conditions – start and end
• Multi-body parts
• Rib
• Feature scope
• Mass properties
• Move/Delete face
• Materials
• Restraints
• Inserting components - new and existing
• Standard mates and advanced mates
• Reference geometry – planes, axis, mate references
• In-context features
• Interference detection
• Suppression states
• Move/Rotate component
• Assembly features
• Collision detection in an assembly
• External references
• Design tables
• Dimensions and model items

Of course, the CSWP exam would daunting enough for even experienced SolidWorks users ... earning the Certified SolidWorks Expert designation takes you into another realm of expectations.  Sure, there are more hurdles and exams to be passed first, but if you intend to effectively USE the credential afterward, people will have higher expectations of you AFTER they learn that you have this designation -- you can call yourself an expert if you've passed the tests based on your study of what's in different books and the designation is a nice feather in your cap, particularly at performance review time ... but you're knowledge will tend to be stagnant and useless or even dangerous if you  develop the habits right now to always work at staying current and being especially relevant ... or you won't be the "go to" expert, even if you have passed the tests.

Regardless of what is required to pass all of the exams, the only really legitimate PRACTICAL way to gain this expertise is through practical experience AND continually sharing, developing and extending your knowledge with the practical expertise of others who share your serious interest in Solidworks.  Since we live in rapidly changing times and increasingly dynamic product development environments, you just can't learn fast enough from reading books or attending training seminars ... although continuing your education is definitely necessary.

To be a legitimate expert, you need to accelerate your ability to know what advanced users will be doing tomorrow... this is not about just listening to marketing hype or just finding out about new features that the SolidWorks sales guys are excited about, although you need to do that, too.  Your first order of business is to find a way to accelerate the development of your expertise by studying and discussing SolidWorks with other users with current project in industry who share the intensity of your interest in SolidWorks.  You need to be thinking about how they could be experimenting with ways to make SolidWorks and other tools even more useful, more powerful for product development.

In other words, if you really want to consider yourself a relevant expert, it goes beyond just understanding the software ... you need to understand how users will be practically putting Solidworks to work and testing its limits on their projects tomorrow... you need to immerse yourself in the SolidWorks community; find out where the traps, pitfalls and opportunities are ... you must work at becoming more networked; you must know how to use all of the tools of the Solidworks Customer Portal and forums and then find and join a SolidWorks Users Group and MAKE YOUR OWN CONTRIBUTION TO A RAPIDLY EVOLVING BODY OF KNOWLEDGE.