Making the Most of Your SOLIDWORKS Investment
Staying competitive means implementing new ways of learning. For something as dynamic and complex as CAD software, the tools are evolving more rapidly than ever; there are always new best practices and techniques. Continuous learning needs to become a normal part of an engineer’s work week.
Jonas Blankenship, CAD Administrator at Zodiac Pools, implemented SolidProfessor Enterprise to maximize their SOLIDWORKS investment and increase design proficiency across his team. Blankenship shared that he “needed a way to ensure that our employees are staying on top of the design software. SOLIDWORKS is constantly releasing new features and updates, so we needed to give our designers a tool that would allow them to stay on the cutting edge. The main reason we were looking for a professional development tool was to keep pushing our employees forward, so that they’re constantly expanding their knowledge and capabilities, allowing us to further improve our industry leading design services.”
“The Update Training course has been really helpful for us as it allows us to ensure that we’re maximizing our SolidWorks investment. SolidProfessor has significantly improved our team’s efficiency within SOLIDWORKS. They’re much more comfortable using different tools, shortcuts, mouse gestures, hot-keys, etc. Even employees that have been working with SOLIDWORKS for years are picking up these time savers and gaining efficiency.”
Another useful feature was the SOLIDWORKS add-in that allows SolidProfessor members to get answers without leaving their design. “SolidProfessor allows our team to learn while they’re designing, so if they run into an obstacle they can look up a solution and get right back to work. Whether they need to relearn functionality or just quickly refresh on best practices, SolidProfessor is always there.
SolidProfessor isn’t just a collection of videos. The online training is personalized with each member having their own profile, assessing where their skills are sharp and where they could use additional training, then tracking their improvement. Blankenship uses personalized learning with his team at Zodiac Pools. “The biggest benefit is our ability to identify a ‘benchmark’ of where our employees are right now. We can then set goals and assign lessons so that they can improve. We use the reporting tools to track their progress through the learning paths to measure their retention and skills improvement.”
With SolidProfessor, members can go through a linear approach to learn a new topic or they can get answers to their questions quickly by using the powerful search functionality. SolidProfessor’s concise, self-paced video lessons, hands-on exercises, and assessments help their members learn and improve their skills.
Visit the SolidProfessor website to learn more. Sign up for a free account to check out the courses and use promo code SOLIDWORKS20 during the month of September to save 20% on paid memberships.
Michelle Stansbury
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- Making the Most of Your SOLIDWORKS Investment - September 20, 2016