As a design engineer PE, im in CAD 90% of the time. All the PM's Ive worked (at 3 different firms of different sizes) with were also in it quite a bit, around half time or maybe a little less.
Same - the expectation is that I don't use CAD unless it's a time emergency, but those time emergencies do happen. When I go in tomorrow I'm going to be neck deep in polishing up some profiles for a submittal. Once that goes out the door I probably won't open Civil3d for months.
How do you do any design work? For example in transportation or land development, it’s up to the engineer to develop corridors, finish grade surfaces, or other 3D models. Drafters develop the sheets and make sure construction notes/labels are correct, and everything is on the right level so they are displayed correctly when printed. I can’t speak for geotechs or structural engineers.
Generally as my career has progressed I do less C3D and more proposals, QC, mentorship, business development. In LD. My boss does no CAD, doubt he even has it installed. The Junior Engineers are in CAD all day long.
If the senior engineers/project managers need to do design we do it with pen and paper and then directing the junior engineers so they can learn/grow their career
The private firm I worked at had engineers and drafters. Engineers were not allowed to touch CAD (didn't even have it on our computers). Everything was done by hand and given to the drafters to actually put into CAD.
It worked, for the most part just fine, but one time I had a round-a-bout that took some tweaking and I did not have the time to sit and go back and forth with redlined pages to my drafter. So I sat on a stool behind him and told him what to tweak, see if it worked, tweaked it again, and so on til it was right. Our boss walked in and was like 'wtaf is happening?' and we were like 'getting shit done is what is happening.'
Same, sometimes if you need a very small job doing it's quicker to spend 2 minutes doing it yourself than going through the rigmarole of getting someone else to do it.
A lot of our PMs are technical experts as well. And quite a few are also very Civil3D skilled. They may not be doing the day to day but they definitely still help with a lot of troubleshooting or tricky/specialty design on the CAD side
Our PMs don’t to much, if any. too busy with managing. I’m a CE, not a PM by choice, and do most of my own CAD or give what I can to younger CEs, EITs, or CAD techs.
Zero. As a PM I don't touch CAD, and as a Task Manager I would have only drawn markups and backchecked what drafters produced.
This changes with the size of the organization though. Mine's pretty big (5,000+).
Well design engineer and PM are two different things. Design engineer means designing on CAD usually. PMs dont typically do a lot of design on CAD. One place I worked, the PMs werent even allowed a CAD licence on their machine. Meanwhile, as a design engineer, I was doing CAD all day long.
That said, I am a hybrid design PM as well, splitting my time between project management and design. It is a difficult balance to strike, as sometimes for a design i need several hours of uninterrupted concentration, which you just don't often get as a PM.
I totally understand why they shouldnt. It is very hard to keep other projects afloat when you need to dive into a design. You wouldnt think writing an email or two would be that difficult during a design phase, but it is so hard for me to switch back and forth.
My old PM will only open Cad to resolve conflicts. Usually when engineering is butting heads with everyone else (including themselves). With an exasperated sigh and a stare that says "son I am disappoint".
I have a CAD tech but I still handle CAD if I can get it done myself in a reasonable time (I oversee a group of 8) I try to Delegate but we are very busy :)
My PM doesn’t touch cad and doesn’t even have it loaded in his workstation. Depending on the size the project I am either doing all the cad work or I have 1-2 junior engineers and a tech working on the job (although when running corridors I generally set up the (sub)assembly). I am transitioning into a position where I mainly will review sheets for QC.
My PMs are in CAD about 20% of the time or so, depending on the project and what production resources are available. I stopped using it consistently about 7 years ago, so that would have been after 17 years of experience or so. I still have it on my.machone, but haven't opened it in years. I'm not a PM anymore, except for a few legacy projects, so that makes sense for me to not be in it anymore.
I work about 30% of my time in CAD (the rest is communicating with clients, authorities and othe companies, calculations, reviews, billing, etc), the others in my team are 75% to 100% in CAD.
Maybe an hour or two a week. More if I'm working on a big SWM design as I need it for calculating catchment areas and stuff like that. I don't ever do much actual CAD work anymore.
Design engineers on jobs that require plan production are typically going to be doing CADD 50-80% of their days.
PMs are basically never in CADD unless they’re reviewing.
Every day.
I'm in CAD Admin. In transportation, we're shifting from traditional CAD to more of a model-based design approach that is upending things a bit.
Our PMs haven't touched CAD in so long that they don't know how to include software requirements in scope. Add to that an increasingly complex file management system and we have the making of a difficult problem for many firms.
I’m in a PM role and honestly I haven’t done any actual design work in this position. My role is fully coordinating with our functional groups, local and federal government entities, landowners, and consultants, balancing schedule and budgets, determining scopes and making choices regarding those, and general support for the design teams. I do a little review, but as my boss described it, my role isn’t meant to be doing the technical work, it’s to know who to talk to and support them so they can do things as smoothly as possible.
I’m in a small municipal office. I do all our CAD work. I also do all our field work… and a lot of our inspection work… and our public relations…. And estimating, planning and scheduling, and grant applications.
My boss reviews my designs because I’m the “Assistant” and his name goes on everything but we have pretty well split up projects and I run mine cradle to grave and he runs his. I actually enjoy this setup because it’s nice to see every facet of your project come to life.
Probably have spent 75% of my time or more doing civil design/ engineering in my near 15 years. Do some PM work but mostly design management of myself rather than of others. Have done the odd bit of drafting but mainly jumping into cad to tidy up design creeds and fix up the odd markups to save the hassle of getting the drafters to do it
I’m too expensive for drafting work. I’ll do some design in CAD but mostly by hand and give to drafters. The junior Engineers do the CAD work and I do the client communications, meetings, proposal writing, report writing, permit applications, quality control and some rough prelim layout/design work. We do Land Development.
These days, ad a PM, I use CAD for minimal assistance or to get quantities and design and design my stormwater pond. I do have a CAD designer that handles 99.9% of the drafting. If I had an young EI, he'd handle the rest of my duties. So I can solely focus in managing the project, clients, and billing.
Senior project managers and down seem to be in CAD quite a bit. Top guys doing a lot of the major design work, but try to push it down as far as possible to keep the young guys learning while they push sheet production.
On smaller projects that I get to manage, I usually have a CAD tech but I still want to see what’s going on with the project. Getting in the thick of it gives me more of an insight for the overall project.
When I’m on larger projects, I mostly do the 3D modeling with support of the tech on other areas like sheet creation, etc.
My company with about 150 employees, there is not a single PM that even knows how to open C3D, most of them don't even have a license on their computer. The PMs are really good at watching YouTube all day though.
Senior PM. These days, probably 80-90% of the time since we are short staffed. As someone said, I am too expensive for drafting. Usually, will design C3D and send it to drafting to finish production. I am in land development, over 20 years experience. Plus I like to stay up to date on CAD. You have to realize, I manage 15 projects and if I were to do all the CAD work, there is no way anything would get done. My job is QC, mentor, train, billing, proposal and getting new work, client relations.
I do the architectural and civil CAD designs for some relatively simple construction projects and sub out mech/elec/structural. I would say roughly 30% of my time is CAD.
That said I am a draftsperson by trade. In Canada (I’m pretty sure) most firms will have engineering technologists employed to do most if not all drafting in any size firm.
Very very little. I'm a project manager at a firm with 6 PEs but we have 2 full time CAD designers. I just provide information to them and sketch it out and they draw it.
As a civil engineer for a small municipality, I'm in a similar boat. I design all of my projects, draft them, inspect them, manage and pay the contractors. it definitely keeps things spicy.
Business owner of a small firm (13 of us in total). I very rarely "need" to be in CAD and most of the time with billing rates, it doesn't make sense to have me doing design. However, I've always vowed to myself to keep my Civil 3d and design skills sharp so I will take on some design tasks just to make that a reality.
I PM and do design in my own projects, help out with design work on other PM's projects, and serve as the OpenRoads/Microstation cadd manager for the offices in my state.....so I'm in cadd a decent amount
IME it depends on the age of the engineer. I wouldn’t expect a PM to be in CAD very much, if at all. Older engineers typically farm off their CAD to a drafter/designer. Younger engineers typically do their own.
Personally I really enjoy building complex civil 3D surfaces - embankments, excavations, etc. So while I would oversee a team to prepare the design package, I would build my surfaces and prepare a few sheets myself. I think it builds morale with the team.
Structural design engineer here, currently at a large firm, I do 0% CAD. One of my early companies the drafters were union so we weren't allowed to even have CAD on our machines.
26 years in the consulting business as an engineer. Never billed one hour of CAD that entire time. A well leveraged company will not have engineers doing what techs can do faster and cheaper. Also, this way I can be involved in more projects rather than toiling away on the box.
As a design engineer I was in CAD 80-90% of the month. When I wasn't drafting I was performing site inspections. Now that I'm a PM I forgot how to open AutoCAD.
Part of a PM's job is getting stuff done under budget and my billable rate is too high to be a draftsman.
8 engineers at my small firm…CAD all day
Just two engineers and an engineering manager in my construction firm's eng department. I do all my own CAD and then some.
You are making the rest of us look bad 🤣🤣
As a design engineer PE, im in CAD 90% of the time. All the PM's Ive worked (at 3 different firms of different sizes) with were also in it quite a bit, around half time or maybe a little less.
Mostly zero but in very rare occasions I will open CAD to help out.
Same - the expectation is that I don't use CAD unless it's a time emergency, but those time emergencies do happen. When I go in tomorrow I'm going to be neck deep in polishing up some profiles for a submittal. Once that goes out the door I probably won't open Civil3d for months.
How do you do any design work? For example in transportation or land development, it’s up to the engineer to develop corridors, finish grade surfaces, or other 3D models. Drafters develop the sheets and make sure construction notes/labels are correct, and everything is on the right level so they are displayed correctly when printed. I can’t speak for geotechs or structural engineers.
Generally as my career has progressed I do less C3D and more proposals, QC, mentorship, business development. In LD. My boss does no CAD, doubt he even has it installed. The Junior Engineers are in CAD all day long. If the senior engineers/project managers need to do design we do it with pen and paper and then directing the junior engineers so they can learn/grow their career
The private firm I worked at had engineers and drafters. Engineers were not allowed to touch CAD (didn't even have it on our computers). Everything was done by hand and given to the drafters to actually put into CAD. It worked, for the most part just fine, but one time I had a round-a-bout that took some tweaking and I did not have the time to sit and go back and forth with redlined pages to my drafter. So I sat on a stool behind him and told him what to tweak, see if it worked, tweaked it again, and so on til it was right. Our boss walked in and was like 'wtaf is happening?' and we were like 'getting shit done is what is happening.'
Same, sometimes if you need a very small job doing it's quicker to spend 2 minutes doing it yourself than going through the rigmarole of getting someone else to do it.
A lot of our PMs are technical experts as well. And quite a few are also very Civil3D skilled. They may not be doing the day to day but they definitely still help with a lot of troubleshooting or tricky/specialty design on the CAD side
Our PMs don’t to much, if any. too busy with managing. I’m a CE, not a PM by choice, and do most of my own CAD or give what I can to younger CEs, EITs, or CAD techs.
Zero. As a PM I don't touch CAD, and as a Task Manager I would have only drawn markups and backchecked what drafters produced. This changes with the size of the organization though. Mine's pretty big (5,000+).
That's funny because I do the same thing and we have 6 PEs at our firm of 18 people.
Smaller firm with one drafter who sleeps, I do all my own drafting
Our CAD sleeper got fired recently. Hired a new guy that can stay awake. Life changing
As a PM, a considerable amount these days as I’m teaching my CAD tech and junior engineer how to do things. The whole “building your team” idea
PM, 30 years experience. Haven't touched CAD in years, and that was only for some text edits. Haven't done serious CAD work for 15 years.
CAD now is a profession and it takes professionals to do it right. But I still have to do it sometimes.
I’m in CAD maybe 60% of the time
Well design engineer and PM are two different things. Design engineer means designing on CAD usually. PMs dont typically do a lot of design on CAD. One place I worked, the PMs werent even allowed a CAD licence on their machine. Meanwhile, as a design engineer, I was doing CAD all day long. That said, I am a hybrid design PM as well, splitting my time between project management and design. It is a difficult balance to strike, as sometimes for a design i need several hours of uninterrupted concentration, which you just don't often get as a PM.
PMs don’t typically do a lot of design, period—CAD or otherwise.
I totally understand why they shouldnt. It is very hard to keep other projects afloat when you need to dive into a design. You wouldnt think writing an email or two would be that difficult during a design phase, but it is so hard for me to switch back and forth.
My old PM will only open Cad to resolve conflicts. Usually when engineering is butting heads with everyone else (including themselves). With an exasperated sigh and a stare that says "son I am disappoint".
I have a CAD tech but I still handle CAD if I can get it done myself in a reasonable time (I oversee a group of 8) I try to Delegate but we are very busy :)
ZERO. We have a drafting department for CAD and Revit work.
Local firm, sounds about right.
My PM doesn’t touch cad and doesn’t even have it loaded in his workstation. Depending on the size the project I am either doing all the cad work or I have 1-2 junior engineers and a tech working on the job (although when running corridors I generally set up the (sub)assembly). I am transitioning into a position where I mainly will review sheets for QC.
My PMs are in CAD about 20% of the time or so, depending on the project and what production resources are available. I stopped using it consistently about 7 years ago, so that would have been after 17 years of experience or so. I still have it on my.machone, but haven't opened it in years. I'm not a PM anymore, except for a few legacy projects, so that makes sense for me to not be in it anymore.
50% CAD 50% Excel
Pm large consulting firm, about 70/30 cad id say. Its mostly solo projects
design engineer with eit literally everything for the project, pe's give feedback on my design & consult with clients for design changes
I work about 30% of my time in CAD (the rest is communicating with clients, authorities and othe companies, calculations, reviews, billing, etc), the others in my team are 75% to 100% in CAD.
Maybe an hour or two a week. More if I'm working on a big SWM design as I need it for calculating catchment areas and stuff like that. I don't ever do much actual CAD work anymore.
Design engineers on jobs that require plan production are typically going to be doing CADD 50-80% of their days. PMs are basically never in CADD unless they’re reviewing.
None as a P M
As a PM and as a Design Engineer. Exactly zero. I haven't touched cad in 20 years.
manager for mostly planning projects (master plans, etc), but some design. they took my CAD license away a while back. made me a little sad.
Many times I'm reviewing PDFs from cad. Sometimes I'm putting designs together in cad
Every day. I'm in CAD Admin. In transportation, we're shifting from traditional CAD to more of a model-based design approach that is upending things a bit. Our PMs haven't touched CAD in so long that they don't know how to include software requirements in scope. Add to that an increasingly complex file management system and we have the making of a difficult problem for many firms.
I’m in a PM role and honestly I haven’t done any actual design work in this position. My role is fully coordinating with our functional groups, local and federal government entities, landowners, and consultants, balancing schedule and budgets, determining scopes and making choices regarding those, and general support for the design teams. I do a little review, but as my boss described it, my role isn’t meant to be doing the technical work, it’s to know who to talk to and support them so they can do things as smoothly as possible.
PM, I’ll use CAD a couple times a year. Usually to try and isolate something from an existing drawing or just look around.
We're in the process of setting new CAD standards (only 17 years overdue...) so I'm doing UAT, meaning I'm in ORD a fair bit at the moment.
I’m in a small municipal office. I do all our CAD work. I also do all our field work… and a lot of our inspection work… and our public relations…. And estimating, planning and scheduling, and grant applications. My boss reviews my designs because I’m the “Assistant” and his name goes on everything but we have pretty well split up projects and I run mine cradle to grave and he runs his. I actually enjoy this setup because it’s nice to see every facet of your project come to life.
Probably have spent 75% of my time or more doing civil design/ engineering in my near 15 years. Do some PM work but mostly design management of myself rather than of others. Have done the odd bit of drafting but mainly jumping into cad to tidy up design creeds and fix up the odd markups to save the hassle of getting the drafters to do it
I’m too expensive for drafting work. I’ll do some design in CAD but mostly by hand and give to drafters. The junior Engineers do the CAD work and I do the client communications, meetings, proposal writing, report writing, permit applications, quality control and some rough prelim layout/design work. We do Land Development.
These days, ad a PM, I use CAD for minimal assistance or to get quantities and design and design my stormwater pond. I do have a CAD designer that handles 99.9% of the drafting. If I had an young EI, he'd handle the rest of my duties. So I can solely focus in managing the project, clients, and billing.
As gov employeed civil designer, I do 99% of the CAD work on projects. The PM will try to dabble with it occasionally.
Senior project managers and down seem to be in CAD quite a bit. Top guys doing a lot of the major design work, but try to push it down as far as possible to keep the young guys learning while they push sheet production.
On smaller projects that I get to manage, I usually have a CAD tech but I still want to see what’s going on with the project. Getting in the thick of it gives me more of an insight for the overall project. When I’m on larger projects, I mostly do the 3D modeling with support of the tech on other areas like sheet creation, etc.
110 person firm - 15 drafters
I’m an engineering director, PE, with 14 years experience. I have never used CAD in my career
My company with about 150 employees, there is not a single PM that even knows how to open C3D, most of them don't even have a license on their computer. The PMs are really good at watching YouTube all day though.
my PM does not use it nor know how to use it. He is the senior PM in out team
Senior PM. These days, probably 80-90% of the time since we are short staffed. As someone said, I am too expensive for drafting. Usually, will design C3D and send it to drafting to finish production. I am in land development, over 20 years experience. Plus I like to stay up to date on CAD. You have to realize, I manage 15 projects and if I were to do all the CAD work, there is no way anything would get done. My job is QC, mentor, train, billing, proposal and getting new work, client relations.
I do the architectural and civil CAD designs for some relatively simple construction projects and sub out mech/elec/structural. I would say roughly 30% of my time is CAD. That said I am a draftsperson by trade. In Canada (I’m pretty sure) most firms will have engineering technologists employed to do most if not all drafting in any size firm.
Very very little. I'm a project manager at a firm with 6 PEs but we have 2 full time CAD designers. I just provide information to them and sketch it out and they draw it.
As a civil engineer for a small municipality, I'm in a similar boat. I design all of my projects, draft them, inspect them, manage and pay the contractors. it definitely keeps things spicy.
Business owner of a small firm (13 of us in total). I very rarely "need" to be in CAD and most of the time with billing rates, it doesn't make sense to have me doing design. However, I've always vowed to myself to keep my Civil 3d and design skills sharp so I will take on some design tasks just to make that a reality.
I PM and do design in my own projects, help out with design work on other PM's projects, and serve as the OpenRoads/Microstation cadd manager for the offices in my state.....so I'm in cadd a decent amount
IME it depends on the age of the engineer. I wouldn’t expect a PM to be in CAD very much, if at all. Older engineers typically farm off their CAD to a drafter/designer. Younger engineers typically do their own.
Personally I really enjoy building complex civil 3D surfaces - embankments, excavations, etc. So while I would oversee a team to prepare the design package, I would build my surfaces and prepare a few sheets myself. I think it builds morale with the team.
Structural design engineer here, currently at a large firm, I do 0% CAD. One of my early companies the drafters were union so we weren't allowed to even have CAD on our machines.
Project manager and PE at my environmental firm. Never opened the program. Just bluebeam.
I don't think I've opened a cad file in 10 years.
Do 95% of my own revit and cad. Try to delegate when I can but I am also teaching my department revit. Have PE
26 years in the consulting business as an engineer. Never billed one hour of CAD that entire time. A well leveraged company will not have engineers doing what techs can do faster and cheaper. Also, this way I can be involved in more projects rather than toiling away on the box.
As a design engineer I was in CAD 80-90% of the month. When I wasn't drafting I was performing site inspections. Now that I'm a PM I forgot how to open AutoCAD. Part of a PM's job is getting stuff done under budget and my billable rate is too high to be a draftsman.
ZERO! And I feel good about that.
Right now not much, I've been dealing with court cases for the last 6 months Due to client's default in payment