Jobs in the UK

michael_leslie

Hi,

Sorry if I shouldn't be posting stuff like this here but I was wondering if anyone was planning to use onshape in the UK and is recruiting? 

Im thinking about looking for a new job and would love to use onshape as my primary cad tool. 

Regards, 

Michael 

kevin_quigley

Not to through water on the fire Michael but if you are looking for a job, working in a company, you need to learn SolidWorks. Every single design business I know uses it, as well as a lot of the supply chain. Would be no harm in learning SolidEdge, Inventor or Creo as well. I honestly don't think Onshape will make any headway into the employer market in the near future as a primary tool. Yes it will be used by a few but the bulk of the market will remain "mainstream". 

I'm saying this as someone who has been there, tried to use non mainstream tools for core work and in the end had to bite the bullet and invest in the mainstream systems. 

The hardest sell for Onshape will be persuading existing CAD users to switch. Free will allow people to try it but to do anything commercial it needs private files and given recent announcements where $75 a month is heavily discounted, that implies the full price will be in the same sort of order as existing subscription levels for mainstream products - so if (like us) you already have a couple of licenses of SolidWorks (or others) and have taken the capital investment "hit" there is no real saving to be made in switching.

We would consider adding Onshape to our toolset once the functionality increases to the point where it could be used for some of the jobs we do, or if it had some additional functionality in the package that we don't currently have  or if it could be used to replace some of the add on services we currently subscribe to (like GrabCAD Workbench or Dropbox) - but then, even at $75 a month that is a considerable premium over an add on service.

joe_dunne

This is all about perspective and what you are trying to achieve. Kevin is absolutely right, the vast majority of companies out there, today, use a traditional installed desktop CAD application.  

For your consideration, 3 things:

Onshape is ridiculously easy to gain access to compared to the traditional desktop applications.  In Onshape you can use the modeling tools without limitations. You are not paying for a shell command, or an advanced modeling command. Parts, assemblies and detail drawings are all accessible to the free user.  So its the natural place to start.

Using Onshape techniques and modeling tools are very applicable to most of the other feature based modeling tools. The skill sets are very common. If you understand the concepts of feature based modeling and design intent... it will carry forth to other applications. So again as a tool for honing skill sets, Onshape is a great place to do so.

Onshape transitions seamlessly to the other products too.  Going from say one of the another legacy systems to Onshape or visa versa,  works very well. That also  reduces a lot the friction when companies look at using new tools like Onshape

The situation today of picking up and using Onshape is far stronger today than any past experience or time period I am aware of.  Like Kevin I too have been in this industry for long time +25 years (geeshh I am old).  But times change, and the risk of using Onshape today is far different than picking up one of the tradition legacy CAD tools were just a short time ago. Its just a lot easier.

Oh and another interesting thing to gnaw on. I remember way back when people were just taking a look at Solidworks. There were many early adopters at that time. I still talk to many of them today, and for the most part they would tell you, that jumping in at that early point in history was one of the best things they did for their careers. 

Joe

michael_leslie

Sorry I should of added a bit of background. 

I have over 7 years of Solidworks experience. I'm currently using Inventor and after 18 months I'm still whining about how Solidworks is better but my colleagues have stop listening. I Started on ProE at Uni and have nearly two years experience in industry with that too (Wildfire 2 is the last release I used for real but I've had a play with Cero).

I was just wondering if anyone out there was planning to use Onshape because I would love to use the cool new toy for real.

If anyone know of cool Solidworks jobs going I might be interested in that to. 

Michael

caradon

I'm trying to be the 'evangelist' for Onshape in my company. You can call me a fanboy or whatever, but I really believe Onshape is right on track to build a CAD system for the future (much more so than Fusion 360 or SWMC or any other attempt I've seen over the years). The core is just really solid. It can only get better.

Dries

kevin_quigley

Michael, thanks for the background, sounds like you have great multi application experience there. In terms of jobs I'm not the best person to ask as I employ designers, but for me the most important skill I am looking for is the ability to solve problems and design. The CAD side is essential for sure and a pre-requisite but I don't expect potentials to have top notch modelling skills, as that can be taught. In fact, often the very experienced modellers come with bad habits that are hard to break. If you are looking for interesting jobs try the back pages of Develop3D magazine or their website, and visit Develop3D Live in March, as that is a fantastic event for meeting and listening to everything that is new in the whole industry rather than one specific sector. If you want to email me your details I can see if any customers need anyone? kevin.quigley at kqd.co.uk

Getting back to Joe's points. I totally agree. I was one of the early adopters of SolidWorks and certainly have never regretted that (wish I could say the same about other systems!). But the CAD industry is a very different place now than in the mid 90s. I think Onshape are doing the right thing offering a free access point to allow anyone to simply log on and try it. I would suggest that Onshape offer a free student version - maybe tied to the institute and allow private documents for the institute account only. I would also suggest they offer a company account package that allows companies to use a certain number of seats for active CAD and unlimited for viewing and markup - but all private. Just last week our biggest customer asked me to look at 3D VIA Glovius for mark up as they were looking at buying it across the sites - never underestimate how valuable it can be for a non designer/non engineer/non CAD savvy person to be able to open a browser and find a 3D file they can spin, and annotate and (ideally) save out in a range of formats for downstream tasks such as website use, graphic design, etc.

For many this will be all the CAD they need (let's face it most SolidWorks users don't do much more than, sketch, extrude, fillet, shell, make simple assemblies and produce drawings) and once Onshape have that core feature set sorted it will be a viable solution for many.

So there will be some early traction I am sure. What I am not sure about through is how rapid that traction will be in the "switchers" category. I can see Onshape offering a solution to companies that have a heavy seasonal project load - just buy in extra seats as needed, or buy seats for external contractors on demand. I can also see Onshape as a solution for companies that are growing - especially small ones. But the difficulty in these cases is working with a multi CAD environment - and this alone is why most companies stick to one system.

I think I suggested a while back that Onshape should develop plug ins for all the main systems so you could, for example, "save to Onshape" from within SolidWorks (in much the same way GrabCAD works). That way you can start the movement to the platform - and especially if you could then use Onshape as a DropBox replacement you would keep all your data in the Onshape cloud. I would go for that, and I know many others would as well. But whatever is done, you still need to be able to access the data back in SolidWorks, and that remains a sticky issue with the current document structure (in that you have no external references). Still, even as an entry to Onshape paying, say $50 a month for your cloud storage plus markup system it would be worth it.

michael_leslie

Kevin,

I haven't done a very good job of selling myself on here, I do also have a 2:1 Mech Eng Degree and 3 patents pending along with my CAD experience. Yeah I've looked at D3D's job page it does have cool jobs but nothing at the moment that interests me.
I'm going to try to go to D3D live this year, I went for the morning session last year and I went in the first year it was on it.

I'm looking at the normal channels too there does seem to be a lot out there at the moment and the money isn't bad either.

Michael

pete_yodis

@KevinQuigley I agree with the plug-in approach.  Onshape could be a GrabCAD like player early on (with a much brighter future).  They could position themselves as a Trojan Horse, if you will.  Their current strength is in the basis of the platform.  PDM, Collaboration, branching/merging, browser only, etc.. is baked in the cake.  This currently makes them unique.  I think there may be some start-ups that bet on them and start off with the Onshape platform as long as it is mature enough in CAD creation features.

Ben_

One thing I see people talking about here and rightfully so is the 'move' to Onshape. However I do not agree. Consider this:

What if Onshape is first used in conjunction with another established CAD system in a company? Then people will get into a inexpensive awesome system (Onshape) to use to communicate with vendors, clients, marketing etc. Then as they use it, I would put money on this next statement, they will find themselves spending less and less time on the other original CAD system until it makes no sense to keep up on the old CAD system. So in the end there will be a 'move' but the baby step everyone will make is to just use OS for the tasks it is exceptional at and then let the public decide if this is a augmenting tool or a replacement tool.

pete_yodis

@Ben I think Onshape will price themselves with this in mind.  Example... Stop paying subscription to SolidWorks, SolidEdge, etc... and apply that money towards Onshape in the future.  Still have your last gen CAD product around and useful when you need it, but increase your use of Onshape.  SolidWorks did exactly that to AutoCAD in a lot of companies.  I really am interested in how data could be brought out of systems like EPDM and into a system like Onshape.  Could that be relatively pain free?  If so, I would be happy to switch from a very heavy IT product like EPDM into something like Onshape.  I don't know if that is realistic, but I can see it being a rubbing point for companies looking to eventually make the switch.

nicholas_radzykewycz

Might be coming at this from the other side of the aisle as I am not that old with only being out of mechanical engineering school for 4 years. Considering it from a career perspective it's been a little difficult from the standpoint that I can't put 4 years of Solidworks experience on my resume. However most employers already recognize that CREO and Solidworks are pretty similar, so switching to a generic term like Solid Modelling is more accurate for most people with this skillset anyway. It's like calling all bathroom tissue Kleenex even if it isn't

That being said for my 3D printing work I've found Onshape has a lot of things going for it over Solidworks, it's UI is a bit friendlier to new users. Custom featurescripts are very very useful for automation right out of the box, and the biggest thing for me is just the sheer reliability and not having the physical hardware costs. It's hard to convince many companies to spend thousands of dollars on nice computers able to run Solidworks well on top of having to pay for licenses. Computers will become outdated in 3-4 years with additional expenses to replace them, Onshape gets around that. Onshape has a really high reliability rate as well, whereas if a physical computer goes down for any number of reasons it could mess up file versions and have all sorts of strange issues.

It's nonstandard, but if you look at the CREO / Solidworks divide it seems like a stretch to say there ever was a universal standard. For folks like me who started as hobbyists out of college looking to replace our Solidworks education licenses from school, Onshape was a perfect fit.