AutoCAD Training – Doing the wrong thing better

One of the concerns I have about AutoCAD training efforts and curriculum is that they forget to explain the WHY and move to the HOW to quickly.

A lot of time may be spent teaching our users how to do the wrong things faster and better. Even if we improve their speed, they are still doing the wrong thing.

We don’t start out teaching them the wrong things. It just happens because they take the “right” teaching and apply it wrongly. If they do not have a deep understanding of how XREF’s work, then teaching them a quicker way to attach an XREF is used in a “wrong” manner to achieve the same bad result we had before we made the user faster.

Explaining the concept of CAD objects, data structure and methods is so vital to the proper training of a CAD user and I think it needs more focus. We should be deeply explaining XREF’s and Viewports and LTSCALE and more so that all of our users understand what is going on behind the scene. Often this will help the troubleshoot their own problems and get back into production quicker.

I enjoy a good training course that takes the time to explain the concept of CAD and not just what button to push.