Topic: upgrading

[Dinosaur]

. . . Any one hiring an obsolete draftsman / designer?

You are not obsolete unless you are also content to maintain your current level of career development.  Keep pushing your company to grow.  There is some good ammunition to that end for you in this thread.  Even if the answer is "NO" again, download the trial version, read the tutorials, ask questions here and log on to civil3d dot com every chance you get and read through those articles.  There is no telling what may be around your next corner.

[jpostlewait]

Thanks everyone for your imput and of course

To be brutally honest you are already obsolete.

I would always appreciate butal honesty over any other spoken or typed word.

Any one hiring an obsolete draftsman / designer?

Willing to relocate and advance?
Last line half in jest.
But you really need to look at your current situation and decide if there is a future there.
I'm sure there is for the land planners but how about you?
Just seems from the tone of your input that you may be the only one looking forward there and everybody else is comfortable.
If you are interested in Learning and will work to improve, plenty of places look for that.
If you stay you have to convince the powers that be that they must stay current or go away.
As Bob Dylan said " If you aren't busy being born. you're busy dying."
And I'm 60.

[Arizona]

Any one hiring an obsolete draftsman / designer?

You are only obsolete if you think like that
You must manage your own career!
If you think any company is going to do that for you, they will, but only until you are no longer of valuable to them.
You must make it a priority to achieve what you want out of a career. You only have X amount of years and it's over. If this means acquiring additional education then do it!
And do not let your age be a factor. You have just as much to offer at 60 as you do at 21 (if its brain power were talking about).
It's up to you whether you allow yourself to become obsolete. I know its not easy to get additional training/schooling because it does take a lot of effort (on top of normal work chores & home chores), but it can be done.

[Dinosaur]

Thank you for taking the time to share some of your training philosophy James.  You make some very good points and I think your closing remarks were right on the mark.  The instructors you describe are precisely the type I was hoping to warn drizzt against choosing.  His situation seems quite tenuous and reads like a recipe for a failed implementation unless he gets some quality training.  When I first mentioned training I did not intend to start a discussion on the relative merits of one training method over another - I apologize. 

[Cannon]

Why apologize? It's a good discussion, and something people should pay attention to. I'll probably clean up my last post and put it on the blog as entry some time this week.

Expectations are all over the board for training. In my opinion, they're entirely too low. It makes it hard to actually sell training when people are used to what's been delivered in the past. When training is crappy, it effects the whole process. Good training sets the tone for the whole process and delivers confidence in both the product and the person at the firm that decided to move forward.

Ask JP, a little credit in the bank to deliver the goods can go a long way.

[drizzt]

Jwedding,

where do you teach?

You are only obsolete if you think like that
You must manage your own career!
If you think any company is going to do that for you, they will, but only until you are no longer of valuable to them.
You must make it a priority to achieve what you want out of a career. You only have X amount of years and it's over. If this means acquiring additional education then do it!
And do not let your age be a factor. You have just as much to offer at 60 as you do at 21 (if its brain power were talking about).
It's up to you whether you allow yourself to become obsolete. I know its not easy to get additional training/schooling because it does take a lot of effort (on top of normal work chores & home chores), but it can be done.

Thanks for the motivational.... It worked!

Do all of you mind if I quote you in order to increase my chances of getting upgraded? I really like this company and the people I work for, they are just technologically challenged

[Dinosaur]

Quote away . . . if management is reluctant to step forward you will need all the supporting information you can gather . . .

Eh, dgreble?

[mjfarrell]

Why apologize? It's a good discussion, and something people should pay attention to.

I couldn't agree with you more, or the rest of you.  Shame such a topic might not be able to get legs, at some other places on the Web.

Let me use some of James' Points to explain my philosophy in regards training:


Your data is crap
While this is true it is the data that they have to work with. There are a lot of users out there who have not had good training, and many with none. And they pass this bad data along.  Often it is the problems caused by this bad data that the company will most benefit from learning how to solve.

I know how the design will turn out.
To be honest most Engineers or Designers have no trouble visualizing the end result of the design. The challenge is how do they get the application to recreate that vision. By going through all the required steps, it also helps them develop the process.  What we don't know is how or where will the software fail to produce the desired results and how to correct those failings.

My data is complete.
The client data may not be complete, however they do need to know how to get it that way.  Otherwise they will run into the very problems you want to avoid in class, and you wont be there.


First impressions count
Yes they do, and showing the user how to employ the entire toolkit to solve his everyday challenges really helps them get the momentum needed to continue using C3D.


It's not a charity event
No it's a learning opportunity for all parties involved.  In using the client data for their classes I learn a lot about them, and the state of their cad affairs. I learn about their local design constraints.  I get to be a student of their challenges and C3D at the same time.  In preparation for and during every class I get to learn something from the students. How do I reimburse them for those lessons?
They probably get to learn more from me than I from them, however that isn't reflected in my fee schedule, I do it for every class.


My thoughts are that more learning that needs to occur the better!  So what they have no exposure to MAP, or that they lack some finesse in basic Autocad! Excellent time to fill in those gaps and smooth the way for even more productive use of C3D. Or for my part; design a traffic circle, when we don't use them in Arizona what a great class for me! 

It's an open debate. Personally, I think the biggest issue with many instructors right now is that they simply can't adapt, and it doesn't matter whose data they use. If you go off the written trail, they're toast. The inability to hit a curve ball is killing the channel AE. It's a poor way to educate the end user, and I think it's the primary reason adoption has been so slow.

And I'm in even MORE agreement with you on this one!


edit:  Just fixed a quote tag  Mav

[Cannon]

Let's make one thing clear. We are talking about Essentials training. IMO, all of the things you've addressed are better suited for other venues and times. Due diligence, mentoring, advanced training, etc. All of these provide a better return on the instructor's and student's time than watching me debug a corrupt drawing while the class sits surfing the internet.

I'm not going to address all your points, but a few:

I know how the design will turn out means I know the values people should get when they click on a line. I can confirm they are moving in the right direction without having to do every click myself. Of course they know what an intersection looks like, that's not the point.

By complete, I mean that I can take the same dataset or location and deal with it from start to finish, letting students see the building of the model instead of jumping around between drawings and project sites.

I wouldn't ask engineering students to understand manifold design without getting through the energy equation first. Essentials is designed to demonstrate tools, not make you a master user.

Want to throw this one up on c3d.com and see what kind of comments we get there?

In any case, it's all minor quibbles, anything is better than watching an instructor read the book to you!

[drizzt]

To be honest most Engineers or Designers have no trouble visualizing the end result of the design. The challenge is how do they get the application to recreate that vision.

Well said!

[dbreigprobert]

my question is- are you willing to pay for it?  i can come in cold and do a demo with someone's data, but I absolutely cannot come in cold and teach a class with someone's data.  I need at least a day of prep time, and then if there is custom documentation to write, add another day.  i throw this proposal in front of the client next to reseller-x's proposal and eyebrows are raised.  we convinced enough people of the value of our services that there is always plenty of work... but you get the picture.

[dbreigprobert]

i'm curious who you worked with.  i don't know many AEs who can take on client data and teach a class from it.  i'd like to make sure i add them to my network.

[jpostlewait]

Thanks Dana for bumping this thread.
I had forgotten it to the the truth but it was a pretty sporty conversation.

[Dinosaur]

i'm curious who you worked with.  i don't know many AEs who can take on client data and teach a class from it.  i'd like to make sure i add them to my network.

I am not positive who this question was for, but I will field it since you already know John's teacher and the rest of the members posting in here have the same one I did (except maybe drizzit by now).  Sinc's firm had instruction from Michael Farrell a few months back and I piggy-backed into one of Michel's sessions at the invitation of a different firm some 900 miles distant in 2005.  In addition to Micheal's students contribution that he has spoken of here to his learning, he has taught himself by doing battle with the beast almost daily since the 2004 pre-release including a weekend marathon with that baby dragon where he discovered most of the essentials needed to proceed.
I will leave it to sinc to go into any discussion regarding how Michael approached their situation.  I am curious because due to my circumstances I did not experience a normal session geared to land development projects although I think the basic approach was the same.  The firm that had contracted Micheal and let me join in was contemplating moving to r2005 Civil 3D from Land Desktop in the yearly subscription upgrade.  Theirs was a rather unusual application that involved reservoir dams and rural access roads.  The basics were the same, just no curbs or curb boxes having to match to the hundredths to fuss with and actually, one of the few applications that r2005 could excel at with minimal problems.  Some 2 weeks before the class was held, Michael was sent data from a representative project along with some examples of finished work they had recently produced along with some data and drawings that they were struggling in-house with at the time.  Over that 2 weeks, Michael developed his class around the provided data, figured out where any problems were and how to address them.  At the start of the first day we got CDs containing the original data sent, a modified data set that we would work from and any documents we would need or want for later reference.  The only deviations I needed at that time since pipes did not yet exist for Civil 3D was I took off with a cul-de-sac project while the rest were working with the Viz-Render they thought they may want to try.
I do not know how to evaluate Michael's fee for this session as my portion fell outside their contract with him.  I just used their generously provided seat at the table,  power plug and occasionally a quick trip on their internet connection.  I know I was pleased with the value I got and the check I wrote Michael was considerably less than my motel and airline expenses.

[sinc]

I don't think I have a whole lot to add - I think I basically already covered everything in my earlier posts.

We had a three-day class last November.  We didn't send Michael anything before class, I just talked to him over the phone and explained that we are surveyors and not engineers, we do lots of construction surveying (both site and roadway), we do lots of design surveys, lots of volume calcs, and lots of plats.  By this time, Michael had a lot more experience teaching C3D than when he did Dino's class, so he didn't seem to need to know much else.

Michael didn't see any of our data until the class, but that didn't seem to matter.  The bulk of the students had not used C3D at all, and there was more than enough for them to learn.  From time to time, Michael would decide we needed to grab some data, like a surface to use as a daylight target for our corridors.  So we would go grab one from one of our projects.  We did this a few times in a few different ways, and learned a variety of ways to get data - from XML, directly from old Land Desktop projects, or by importing CSV data and adding the points to a surface.  We had not been using the FBK stuff in Land Desktop, so that was a new item for us, but Michael provided us with a sample FBK file that we used for the class, and we used the surface created by that  FBK file at one point.  Other than that, it was basically all our data.  (I later used the FBK file he provided as an example for getting our office using automated linework, which has been an overall boon to our office despite the flaws in the design of the process.)

At another point, he started showing us how to do some construction calcs from the type of data we usually get.  In this particular case, we used a parking lot that we needed to stake.  We had terribly messy linework provided by another company that was not using Civil-3D (and may not have even been using Land Desktop).  Contours were hand-drawn - incorrectly, of course.  Our only good vertical data came from spot elevations on the flowlines.  Plus, it was drawn by someone who apparently had an aversion to OSNAPs and commands like Chamfer, Fillet, and Offset - in other words, the data was about as bad as it could get.  Over the course of a couple of hours, Michael showed us how to turn the terrible drawing into one with nice, solid linework that we could turn into feature lines, which we graded with the Elevation Editor.  In a very short period of time, we had a 3D model of the parking lot, complete with contours that were far better than the flawed and impossible ones the engineer had drawn in.  (This then led to the question of how to create stakeout points for 3' offsets to TBC from the feature lines, which eventually became the motivation behind the STAKEFEATURES command in the SincpacC3D.)

All in all, we spent very little time retrieving and cleaning up data, and I think we got about as much C3D training as the guys were able to absorb at once.  By the end of the three days, we had EVERYONE in our company creating surfaces, alignments, feature lines, parcels, and simple corridors.  This was in comparison to the Sitelines webcast that we had been watching on Autodesk's web site, where we watched one woman at a company go spend a week at official Autodesk training, then spend the next five months struggling to accomplish what everyone in my office could do after three days of training.

And I suppose the ability to pull in all kinds of data is more important to us than to engineers, who create much of their data.  But it was a critical aspect of the class for us.  We have little say over what sort of data we get, it's usually sloppy and difficult to work with, and it's never done in C3D, but we still have to deal with it.  For us, pulling in "bad data" and making it usable is actually a large part of using C3D, one of our most-frequent tasks.  Training that did not cover this aspect of C3D would have ill-served us.  It was definitely  not a distraction from "more important" topics, or anything like that.  It was critical knowledge, and probably a large part of the reason why we didn't follow the path of some others we've seen, who get C3D and training, only to drop C3D in frustration a month or two later.

Of course, after the class, we had no idea what lay ahead with regard to creating Plats.  But as it turns out, there's probably enough in Parcels and Parcel Labels and the related sundry mess that it could take up a complete three-day class in itself, and Michael was undoubtedly wise to leave that topic out of our three-day intro...