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CAD Manager's Survey 2011 Goes Live

The annual survey is back — and it needs your input to succeed!

Over the past decade, I've been surveying the CAD management community to report on salary trends and various other factors that reflect job conditions for CAD managers. Each year, I ask for your help so we can all learn where we stand and how conditions compare with previous years.

In the past three years we've seen a lot of volatility in the economy, and resultant changes in the compensation and duties for CAD managers. There have also been profound technology developments — including BIM (building information modeling) adoption, cloud computing, WAN (wide-area network) challenges, and self-paced training tools — that have conspired to change the tools we all use to manage CAD in our environments. So in this year's CAD Manager's Survey, I'll be asking some new questions to help quantify how the CAD management landscape is changing.

Please take a few minutes to read through the content of the survey and the descriptions of the analyses I will perform, then log on and participate in the survey. The more replies we get, the more useful the survey will be. After the results are tabulated, I'll digest and analyze the data and draw some conclusions that I'll report to you in future issues of the CAD Manager's Newsletter.

Here goes.

Compensation and Demographics

The number-one thing I'm asked is how much CAD managers are making, given the experience and educational credentials they bring to the table. I'm seeing a rift growing between 2D and 3D/BIM managers, so questions to measure these trends have been added this year. I'm also tracking gender and age information to determine how the CAD manager role is changing in terms of average age and male-to-female ratio.

Questions will include the following:

• Are you male or female?
• What is your age?
• How long have you been a CAD manager?
• Do you have a two-year, four-year, or advanced college degree?
• What is your total pay?
• Are you salaried or hourly?
• If hourly, do you receive overtime pay?
• Has your pay been cut in the last year?
• Has your pay been frozen in the last year?
• Did you get a raise in the last year?
• Do you receive profit-sharing benefits?
• Do you receive an annual bonus?
• Do you receive company-paid health insurance? (U.S. respondents only)

Economic Uncertainty

In order to correlate industry performance and compensation, I'll be asking some questions about the business environment of your company. Since all these questions will refer to the past year, we should get an accurate picture of whether our companies are emerging from the global recession, staying the same, or experiencing worsening conditions.

• Has your company had layoffs in the past year?
• Have your weekly hours been reduced? If so, how much?
• Is your workload increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?
• How secure is your current CAD management position?
• What has happened to the number of CAD users in the past year?
• Is your company purchasing new hardware?
• Has your company allowed software subscriptions or licenses to lapse?
• Has your company training budget been cut?

Software, Hardware, and the User Environment

These are the basic figures required to compute the hard metrics of CAD management like support ratios, product knowledge, and IT involvement. Additionally, software, hardware, user counts, and technology platforms allow analysis on how software is actually used to complete projects within the company.

This year I've expanded the coverage to delve much more deeply into how 2D and 3D are being used and how software is being customized. To simplify the analysis I'm "de-product-izing" the survey this year to reference software types (mechanical 3D, BIM, 2D drafting, etc.) rather than keep track of product counts. I hope to compile a new analysis of 3D adoption and usage rates after the survey is completed.

Questions will include the following:

• How many CAD machines do you manage?
• How many CAD users do you support?
• Do you specify hardware or does IT do so?
• Do you support hardware? If so, how many hours per week?
• What's your main CAD software?
• How many total CAD software packages do you manage?
• Do you manage rendering/visualization software?
• Do you manage analysis/simulation software?
• Is your company totally 3D, totally 2D, or a mixture of the two?
• If it's a mix, what percentage of your users are 3D?
• Are you investigating new 3D technology?
• Do you collaborate with customers/vendors using 3D models?
• Do you use 3D visualization or prototyping to assist in design?
• Do you customize your CAD systems?
• Do you use/can you program AutoLISP?
• Do you use/can you program Visual Basic?
• Do you use/can you program VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)?
• Do you use/can you program .NET?

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