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.