SOLIDWORKS Design & Help

You can check out Gabriel Corbett's weekly tricks and tips on YouTube. This should help

If your intention is to become employable, working within the engineering and manufacturing industry, do a bit of research into the skills and experience that prospective employers desire. From a career in this industry, in my location, of 40 + years that I am now coming to the end of, methods and tools change, but two aspects of working within this field that keep you employable are, a sound engineering knowledge, and the ability to quickly adapt to new tools and processes that we make use of when applying our knowledge and skills.

Gaining a CSWA certification may be a qualification that will be recognized by some of your prospective employers, but in my view it is not that useful, for determining how suitable, a prospective employee, will be, working within the engineering and manufacturing industry. There will be many that will not agree with my position on the CSWA qualification, but as I see it, it means little as a qualification to ascertain a persons usefulness working within this industry.

When I started out in the 1970's all engineering design and drawing was produced with manual drawing methods, next came 2D CAD then 3D model based design and manufacture. Throughout these changes the two things that kept me employed, were a good sound engineering and technical education, along with the ability to quickly learn new things.

From what little I have seen of the CSWA certification many of the models that turn up in the examination are poor examples of good engineering design and as such are of little value. CSWA may fill out part of your CV, but for an indication of engineering ability and skill, the quality and usefulness of your output in the workplace, it is not that good an indication of your value. It is engineering skill that will keep you employed. Another attribute in this modern world is being able to take what skills you have and apply them in new ways. You need to be able to quickly learn all of the main 3D CAD applications, not just Solid Works and occasionally being able to get on top of more obscure applications is required.

The more models you make, the more expert you become. For tutorials choose youtube and even here there are great quality tutorials.

The maestro has spoken all :-)

Practice, practice, practice! You will learn every tricks by practicing alot.

Hello Opassan,

Just a few comments regarding your quest. The CSWA certification is really just for beginners. It is dead easy to pass for anyone who has talent for Solidworks and has spent a couple of weeks modelling full-time in Solidworks. On the other hand; if someone finds it difficult to pass the CSWA certification, they should probably think twice about a career as a CAD-professional. It would be a struggle...!

The second advice I will give is this: Don't try to find rules for everything. That is a waste of time because there will always be situations/models where you don't have any rules, so you have to decide on your own approach. So, as other have stated: Practice, practice, practice and use your imagination; try to model an object in as many different ways as possible and see what is best/fastest/easiest.

The only concrete Solidworks related advice I will give is:

1) Use the S-key and customize the pop-up menus to include all the tools you frequently use. This saves a lot of time.

2) Build parts around the origin and use the standard planes for reference. I know of nothing more annoying than parts floating freely in space far away from the origin...!

Good luck.

You can check this site. I hope you can get some help.

https://www.solidprofessor.com/

Also, you can check for tutorials around this community.

you can simply revise 2 command tabs i.e. FEATURES AND SKETCH....