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.