Someone (i.e. my teenage daughter) claims to have heard from a someone else (i.e. her equally teenaged friend) that anyone who learns AutoCAD can then command $60 per hour working as a draftsman for architects and the like.
My question is what in fact are the employment opportunities, if any, for someone skilled with this program, and what other prerequisites might there be for such jobs beyond just knowing the program?
I wish I were getting $60 an hour for my CAD skills. I’m a land surveyor in Los Angeles and do not know what the job market is like in the rest of the country, but here architectural and engineering firms are laying people off presently.
Like other lines of work if you have background in the field you are working in so much the better. For instance it will help you greatly if you know something about engineering if you want to work for an engineer.
No there are certs with it but you dont need one. You can get a job by just knowing one. And an employeer may pay you w/e they want.
I used to detail for a steel company and would make 150$ per sheet average of about 10 sheets per job. That said, I have a lot of experience and it took me a few years to get there. I doubt someone fresh out of school would be able to start there. They more than likely would start at a firm making an hourly rate around 18$. Also the freelance detailing I did was not stable. With construction you may go a while without anything.
Now Im working for an engineering company and we have a guy who has been detailing since the 60’s. He makes about 50 an hour, 40 hours a week. So to answer your question, there is the opportunity to make quite a bit of money, depending on experience and customer satisfaction, O.T.O.H. you can get stuck somewhere making only 12 dollars an hour. I have a friend who is stuck in that position, it’s not as stressfull or demanding as freelance but thats why the pay is so low. The more responsibility one has the more pay you get.
Lastly, I love the job, autocad is pretty fun to use. It’s rewarding seeing a building go up that you played a part in. Without your details nothing would get done (done right anyway) 
Well, I doubt she can make $60/hr anytime soon as a simple beginning drafter. More like $15-20/hr. The more specialized and experienced she becomes the more valuable she’ll be (i.e. able to effectvely use programs like Civil 3D rather than vanilla autocad.
One good thing about vanilla autocad - you can download it and use it for a month for free. Combine this with a few easily availble textbooks with examples you can work through and you can really teach it to yourself if you put in the time. And, if you can use it well you can potentially get hired somewhere based on that. But not at $60/hour.
As far as education, I will speak to what I know.
In the Civil land development field, I found that design firms would want to hire engineering technologists or EIT’s to use the AutoCAD Civil 3D program. This is because the design of the project can actually be done most effeciently by the drafter as you go along and dynamically calculate efficient grading, profiles, etc. However, there are still some engineers who will ‘redline’ all of the paper drawings and then hand them to a ‘dummy’ drafter to recreate their linework. But in this field if that is all the drafter can do, he will be less valuable. If you have a two year degree in Civil tech and you can do the design yourself then your value goes up. The engineer than just has to review the drafted plans and redline any problems they see.
There is a hell of a lot more to being a good draftsperson than just piloting the software. Not only do you need to know how to be able to make good, usable views and dimension them in ways that are usable to fabricators, welders, architects, construction contractors, et cetera. Kids just out of school who just know how to play with at CAD or parametric modeling tools are (somewhat disparagingly) known as “CAD monkeys”, and are basically useful only for very simple drafting tasks; it takes a couple of years of experience before you can drop a drafting job onto one of these and expect to get back anything that doesn’t have to immediately go in to the shreader, more if some very specific cartographic data or geometric dimensioning and tolerancing has to be incorporated. Back in the days of hand drafting drafters would apprentice for three or four years before even being given a real assignment of their own; unfortunately, you now have entry-level “designers” doing a lot of CAD/drafting work with only a few months experience, or worse yet. degreed engineers with no real experience or guidance making drawings that are nearly unintelligible. None of these people (other than a senior designer or project engineer) is making anything close to $60/hr. Some freelance designers might be making $30/hr to $40/hr, but that’s gross before taxes, insurance, overhead, et cetera. Direct hire is going to be anywhere from $10/hr to $25/hr for a drafsterperson/designer from entry level to five years.
Stranger
Just another data point for no way.
Sounds like maybe they heard about a reasonable fully loaded CAD rate that gets charged to a client on an invoice and thought the employee gets to keep all of that. But (as Stranger notes for freelancers but applies to employees in general) that fully loaded rate is the labor rate (employee pay) + overhead (cost of doing business) + profit (reason for owner being in business).
Based on overhead and profit rates I’m familiar with, the employee would actually make about a third of the fully loaded rate. Or more accurately, the employee’s labor rate is close to tripled before being passed along to the client.
So out of $60 charged to a client, the CAD employee would only see about $20 as base pay. And you’re not going to make that much as a beginner in my experience, but depending on the exact industry and location I’ll just note that YMMV.
That said, it’s not the worst way to eek out a living if you like doing that kind of thing but you won’t get rich and, as others noted, you really need to be able to do something more than simple drafting. The days of a CAD operator just making an electronic drawing of what the designer sketched up are mostly behind us - employers generally want people that know how to do the design in CAD from the get go. Which can mean learning some kind of additional design software that runs in the CAD environment and the knowledge of what to do with it.
Your teenaged FOAF is full of it. Our AutoCAD experts earn from $15 to $30 per hour at best, and the high end is only after many years of experience. Shoot, I don’t even know more than a couple Architects or ArchE’s who make $60 an hour.
Now there is an exception - AutoCAD contractors do get hired for between $40 to $70 an hour, depending upon their skills. But these are contract positions, as in no sick time, no health insurance, no benefits, no vacation, no nothin’. They don’t even get paid for Christmas day. And they tend to “feast or famine”, meaning they might go a year working 50-hour weeks with paid overtime, then be off for 3 months waiting for the next gig. I’d reckon they do make more than their salaried compatriots, but with much more uncertainty about their job.
Soooo, would knowing AutoCAD get you a slightly higher beginning pay than knowing the standard office suite (Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Project/Access)?
Teenagers are idiots. When I used to teach teenagers, they told me they didn’t need to learn anything because they were going to play in the NBA (including the girls.) When I told them Shaq, Kobe, KG and others went back to college and earned their degrees, they promptly switched to “rappers.” When I told them the best rappers still need to understand things like rhyme, meter, writing, etc., they promptly changed to “living at home with their parents for the rest of their lives.”
The simple ability to use software is considered a prerequisite for more and more jobs. At some point it will be in the category of reading and writing. I see recent college grads being hired now without experience with a particular tool necessary for the job, based on the expectation that they can learn the specifics in a short time. Stranger On A Train stated it well. These aren’t just fancy typing jobs, the background knowledge is what people gets you the high starting pay, and with most jobs, results are necessary to maintain it.
Tell her lots of skilled trades are billed at similar rates to the customer. I have had to explain to several customers I do not make $79/hour. Well I do, for about 3 hours a day, minus fuel, truck payment, insurance, advertising, oh look I have about $50 left, its miller time! (because we can’t afford good beer)
Not in itself. Like has been stated in the thread, knowing how to use AutoCAD but not knowing the basics of drafting or design is like hiring someone to be an editor because they know Word, as opposed to having English education or experience.
Our lowest-experience CAD drafters have a 2-year degree from either a community college or a technical college (like a DeVry). Some have things such as CET or MET degrees (Civil and Mechanical Engineering Technician, respectively). Some have 4-year “Engineering technician” degrees (and they bitch and moan for years afterwards about how they should have got an Engineering degree).
It’s not impossible to be hired as a CAD drafter with no actual degree or experience. But IMO those jobs would be as rare as hen’s teeth. I was hired as a CAD drafter in the early 1990’s, but I was a Senior in Engineering so I at least had some background.
when kids ask about drafting, try telling them a simple slogan: companies don’t pay drafters, they pay technicians.
To draw a picture of an electronic integrated circuit, or an architectural wall section, or a structural steel fastener, you need to understand electronics, or architecture, or structural engineering, etc.
Go to college!
(a 2 year communitiy college may well be enough to earn a reasonable living)
At my office we don’t even hire draftsman. We hire young Architects in training and they all have cadd backgrounds. I would say they average $16 to $20/hr within a couple of years. These are young people with either a Bachelor or Masters of Architecture. Even experienced licensed Architects with 20 years experience won’t make $60 hour as an employee, but could bill that much as a contract employee with all the negatives noted in the posts above.
So no way is a young teen going to make $60 hour. Just isn’t going to happen, at least not working for an Architect. Some Architects do hire drafters but it is more likely they would find work with a Structural or Civil engineer and again they aren’t making $60/hr. It is a good field to go into but I would suggest that they go beyond that and become the Architect or Engineer if they truly want to make decent money.
I taught myself AutoCad in 1984 during my senior year of college (version 1.01)and it got me my first engineering job. I continued on the “technical” path for 18 years, eventually mastering 3D solid modeling software (SDRC I-deas), performing Finite Element Analysis and running 3D animation/mechanical simulations. I brought in top pay as a contract design engineer for hire and traveled extensivly; women wanted to be with me and men wanted to be me. 
I now make better money and have a more stable life running multinational projects using MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Project; but often times I miss being a free lance CAD monkey. 
This. There are far too many people in engineering who made that choice because they heard the pay was good. For someone who enjoys, and is passionate about the work, the pay CAN be pretty good, but someone who struggles to make it to work each day and is counting the minutes 'till quitting time will never, ever, get there.
Beyond knowing how to drive the program, at a minimum there is a lot of jargon that needs to be learned in order to effectively communicate with the engineers. This is a HUGE problem I currently have with a Chinese CAD person who otherwise does great work. I’m sorry, but I don’t know another word for detent, (heh, the spell checker is flagging that!) bushing, indexing, pilot bore, broach, corner relief, etc. This is one reason a CAD person typically needs to specialize in a narrowish field.
$60/hr is a fully loaded rate in a pricey market, for someone who works fast communicates well, and solves more problems than they create. I have never met such a draftsman that didn’t come from the trade they are serving. A carpenter that no longer wants to work outdoors might make a great architectural draftsman for example, and the two best mechanical draftsman/designers I know of spent years turning cranks in machine shops.
Most CAD programs will let you draw a blind, square, hole with a 90deg turn in the middle. Most machine shops will laugh when they return those drawings with no bid. This is only a slight exaggeration of stuff I have seen.
Exactly!
My impression from where I worked for many years - when CAD came along, it meant they got rid of a room full of draftsmen, and all the engineers and surveyors below boss level were expected to produce their own drawings.
It used to be the engineer would hand-bomb a drawing, pass it to a drafsman with his big table and drafting gizmo, and produce a pretty, vault-ready drawing. With and engineer or technician fluent in CAD, they should be able to do the drawing themselves as fast as they could get one form a draftsman, plus eliminating the back-and-forth time and the “oops, I didn’t see that” errors.
(Same as secretaries - once the generation who had never touched a keyboard had passed on, by about 1999, personal secretaries doing your typing and memos and mail were a thing of the past unless you were a really big cheese).
Plus, going to CAD - the quick an dirty upgrade jobs used to be pasting a chunk of white paper over part of the existing drawing, drawing the changed parts, and submitting that to the vault. Now, every drawing probably in some way starts with a copy of something else. Presentation quality and completeness (and finishing the job and filing the drawing) were much more regular.
A technician is usually someone who knows more that the engineer, but is not allowed to sign off on the work.
So should they learn CAD? By all means, if that is where their interest lies. The analogy to MS Office or Word is the same. If you go into any information job - accountant, consultant, editor, PR, tech writer - the ability to produce reports, spreadsheets, instruction books etc. quickly and professionally will greatly speed the work. If you go into anything from surveying to geology to engineering or construction to mining, the ability to produce the requisite drawing is important; when they do take the courses, CAD will be one thing they ace and producing drawing as part of their other clsses will go much more smoothly.
However, because the tools mean anyone with a bit of knowledge can produce relatively professional results - the issue will not be drafting or typing or spreadsheet skills per se - it will be what you know that can leverage those skills.
Yeah, this company hired people for $60 an hour; but yes, half of that went to the contratcor company and tehy did not hire draftsmen - they hired techs like ventilation or piping technicians who could flesh out a basic design and commit it to CAD.
[sub]You might be able to cast it…[/sub]
Not wihout a draft angle (unless you are doing lost wax or sand casting) and at any rate a machinist wouldn’t care. And even, or rather, especially with castings you’ll have a minimum interior fillet radius.
As an engineer, I’ve corrected many a design by collegues which lacked basic manufacturability. And I have to admit to creating a couple such designs myself, though I’ve always had the habit of running concepts past a manufacturing engineer, machinist, or welder before going into a Design For Manufacturing Review, so I’ve never been humiliated in front of a group, or at least, not on that issue.
Stranger