We frequently hear complaints that young design engineers lack an understanding of manufacturing processes. This is partly due to a decline in the manufacturing skills students learn during their education. But it is also due to students receiving low-quality practice data that fails to reflect real-world manufacturing processes.
Teaching young design engineers to construct robust 3D CAD models should be the foundation of any engineering design course. Students need practice files that aid them in learning the essential elements of creating CAD models that illustrate real-world engineering solutions. The design engineers of the future deserve high-quality training materials.
Practice files should teach students the fundamentals of creating CAD models and provide them with at least a basic understanding of Design For Manufacture (DFM) principles. Instructing design students with CAD with files that promote poor design habits is detrimental to the industry. It creates unrealistic expectations of a well-defined CAD model and conveys the idea that any feature added to a CAD model can be manufactured.
Incorporating a mandatory manufacturing component into every design course would significantly enhance the knowledge of young design engineers. However, not every college and university is lucky enough to have manufacturing facilities on site. We must also remember that not all design engineers attend colleges or universities. Some take online courses, and some learn independently using whatever information they find online. So, Whilst the gold standard in educating design engineers should be mandatory manufacturing experience, we also need to ensure that students who learn remotely have access to high-quality training data.
Generally, the training materials students use to learn how to use CAD do not reflect real-world manufacturing practices, and even worse, they teach students bad modelling habits. We must not set the next generation of design engineers up to fail. Instead, we should provide top-quality training data that teaches students how to use CAD effectively and gives them insights into manufacturing best practices from day one.
There is no substitute for time spent in an engineering workshop to help students understand the limitations of manufacturing processes. However, giving students well-structured practice files could go a long way towards teaching basic manufacturing principles. If engineering design courses cannot offer workshop experience, they should invest in creating high-quality practice files that help close the gap in every student’s manufacturing knowledge.
