Looking for suggestions on helping users learn CATIA (from scratch) in one or 2 days...

I've observed that young mechanical engineers (~20 to ~35 years old) are not willing to seat for traditional user training courses. I have been struggling to help such groups to learn how to work in 3DEXPERIENCE native client (CATIA/ENOVIA/SIMULIA applications).

It seems like this group finds the usual DS EDU 3DSpace training (ex 'companion' courses) boring, slow and not addressing their needs. My understanding is that they are looking for bite-sized nuggets of information available exactly at the moment they need them. They are constantly asking for tips/tricks and shortcuts to learn to work with this application is a single day if possible...

Has anyone faced this kind of requirement? Do you have any suggestions on how to tackle this?

Thanks,

I exactly didn't feel the same. Because DS EDU 3DSpace have very clear information in theory and Images and videos format that helped me to the maximum in my work. But, i believe a student would like to learn the DS modules in a quick look instead of reading pages of instructions. So, helping with a clear and fast videos on specific functions and operations by design and development of products would help students.

I find that this book is useful and very precise on Catia training. 

https://www.cadcim.com/catia-v5-6r2021-for-designers

Thanks for the recommendations. I omitted to mention that this particular group of users has been transitioned from SolidWorks (due to limitations for large assembly management) to 3DEXPERIENCE Native Client (mostly CATIA apps).

I agree that the training provided by DS addresses key concepts on the application and is thorough in explaining 'how it works'. But I found that the learning curve is not steep enough to keep this particular audience engaged. They are looking for smaller chunks of information that address the questions or issues they have at the moment they have them. They are not willing to spend the time to read through a complete DS 3DU Space module before being able to work in the application.

Management is also finding it hard to allow training time (time=money). They are also asking for a different 'training' methodology that does not require an engineer to spends more than 1 hour in training sessions.

In any case, thanks again for the suggestions.

One thought would be to attend the COEXPERIENCE Event on April 10-13.  You would gain so much knowledge and contacts being able to ask this same question in person to fellow 3DEXPERIENCE users like yourself.  The investment for you to travel there for a few quick days would tremendously pay off on finding your answer to this question...and MANY MORE questions that you may have.  Its perfect timing really for you to take advantage of this opportunity.

https://www.coe.org/coexperience

Not sure if this would help your situation but the "Explore" courses in Companion offer quick walkthroughs of methodologies in ~5minutes videos per subject. If you have access to the Companion Courses try checking out the "Explore the Mechanical Designer Role" course as an example. For each topic there is a brief use-case introduction and then a video. This doesnt go over each detail but shows enough to give the designers a baseline.

I would recommend looking into:

https://myigetit.com

It’s not free but it’s a pretty decent training resource

Thanks a lot for the recommendations. We are already enrolled (and paying for) the IGetIT training.
Also, I will keep advocating for attending COE internally. I also think it is a great place where to share experiences about the DS tools. Thanks again!

Gisela, 

We've often found that Solidworks users are very well versed in CAD and associated functions, pad, cuts, fillets, etc. Our 2 day class is specifically tailored to Solidworks or CATIA V5 users focused on the key differences between Solidworks/V5 and the 3DEXPERIENCE. https://www.inceptra.com/course/catia-v5-to-v6-mechanical-design-transition/ Class is open to the public. Hope it helps. 

Gisela - we do train the trainer - the trainer for our company takes the Catia classes and learns what he or she can - then he applies it to the group and ONLY trains what is needed to do his or her job. it generally takes only 1 1/2 days for new 20-35 year old employees the complete the "in house" training - then you are only paying for 1 person for a traditional training (Boring) class - very fast getting your employees up to speed to be productive. hope this helps

Hi

Sorry, do you really think that CATIA can be learned from scratch in1-2 days?

Please check this article...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/few-advice-catia-beginners-fernando-petre/

Best regards

Fernando

Gisela,

There is the obvious things that young people do, and that's YouTube. There is a 3DS CATIA here. And another channel for beginners here.

Maybe that will get you started. CATIA is a very broad and deep subject. Something to keep in mind is orienting the learners on the CATIA structure. It is much more sophisticated than the SOLIDWORKS structures, and there are no files to think about, which can help and hinder new learners.

Thank you,

Michael Craffey
Razorleaf Corporation

Gisela,

There is the obvious things that young people do, and that's YouTube. There is a 3DS CATIA here. And another channel for beginners here.

Maybe that will get you started. CATIA is a very broad and deep subject. Something to keep in mind is orienting the learners on the CATIA structure. It is much more sophisticated than the SOLIDWORKS structures, and there are no files to think about, which can help and hinder new learners.

Thank you,

Michael Craffey
Razorleaf Corporation

Thanks again for all the recommendations but I was asking about non-conventional methods of training. I understand that you can build know how with time and the known paths of doing so, but the problem here is different.

An example of an application that tried to tackle this problem is what the Gehry Technologies did at one point in time with the CATIA V5 client (Digital Project 3D). They packaged the application to host all the products and licenses they understood their users needed. By doing so, they did provide all options to the user from the start by enabling a UI with all commands and functions available but they lost scalability in the process.

Preserving the possibility of running any supported piece of code in the 3DX Native Client (CATIA, ENOVIA, DELMIA, SIMULIA...) at any given time is part of the objective here. But what you gain flexibility you lose in usability. You end up with a highly versatile tool that is very hard to use and is not intuitive at all. If you add to that a group of users that motivated by innovation, change and creativity, which pursue not defining rigid workflows and design requirements that change on a daily basis, then you reach the question I'm presenting here.

Gisela,

I am seeking the same creative implementation of a learning path for users.  Traditional methods are no longer effective.  We must find solutions that liberate the user to learn at their pace while ensuring they build the knowledge than skills to feel confident in their job.

Gisela,

in the past we’ve had some challenges on projects where there was the desire to get folks engaged with CATIA that definitely thought they had no interested. 

Thinking unconventionally, we thought that allowing them time to model something that they were interested in a hour a day over several weeks might work. We provided support to the same level as we would on an actual company project.

Having a goal seems to work very well. Having an invested application seems to work very well. Being able to take something away seems to work well.

One particularly “stubborn” employee was a model railroad enthusiast. We helped him model train cars over a period of 6-8 weeks. He was all in on CATIA at the end.

If this was being tackled today I would have also coordinating 3D printed one of the cars that he could have taken home. 

Robert

I’m also curious about the qualification that traditional methods are no longer working.

I’ve never personally experienced some going from no experiment to functional in CATIA in two days. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone experiences in CATIA even transitioning from a previous version to a new version in 2 days.

Do you mind me asking, what are the traditional methods that were working they got people up to speed in 2 days?

I would probably second @Robert Jackson here.

- The easiest path to learn something is via a game. In the modern world 3D printing opens a real-life application to whatever users create in their CAD.

- Once upon a time, we worked in a project where users created 3D CATIA models which were then imported into a gaming engine, in that case it was Unity3D. Their models became spaceships etc. The amount of fun was unbelievable.

- Saying all that, 2 days for CATIA is a big stretch. CATIA is a sophisticated system with too many features to fit into a single non-Einsteinian brain in that limited time-frame.

In Reply to Gisela Attadia:

Thanks again for all the recommendations but I was asking about non-conventional methods of training. I understand that you can build know how with time and the known paths of doing so, but the problem here is different.

An example of an application that tried to tackle this problem is what the Gehry Technologies did at one point in time with the CATIA V5 client (Digital Project 3D). They packaged the application to host all the products and licenses they understood their users needed. By doing so, they did provide all options to the user from the start by enabling a UI with all commands and functions available but they lost scalability in the process.

Preserving the possibility of running any supported piece of code in the 3DX Native Client (CATIA, ENOVIA, DELMIA, SIMULIA...) at any given time is part of the objective here. But what you gain flexibility you lose in usability. You end up with a highly versatile tool that is very hard to use and is not intuitive at all. If you add to that a group of users that motivated by innovation, change and creativity, which pursue not defining rigid workflows and design requirements that change on a daily basis, then you reach the question I'm presenting here.

Hi Gisela,
In my opinion if you want to make good trainings, first of all, you should stop thinking as a trainer/teacher and start thinking as the student/pupil/engineer etc.

I personally found all catia trainings, I've participated in, extremely boring and inadequate.

To cite Miguel de Icaza (creator of Gnome, Xamarin, Mono, etc.)

"Coming up with the ideas to try out what you have just learned is difficult. As you think of things that you could do, you quickly find that you are missing knowledge (discussed in further chapters) or your ideas are not that interesting. In my case, my mind drifts into solving other problems, and I go back to what I know best. Please, build exercises into your books. Work with teachers to find the exercises that match the material just exposed and help us get in the zone of Flow".

The Flow, is very important if you want to make your training "attractive" to the trainees. You should understand more about them. Learn their interests, learn what other software they know, you have to know the advantages of Catia over these software. But don't go too hard as catia has a lot of disadvantages too. Separate the trainees in groups if you have to according to what you've learned about them.

It is my opinion, that the best and the worst thing about CATIA is its strong parameterization. That both attracts and repulse people (as it does me) depending on how they use modeling software. Another thing that repulses, especially about catia is the mouse controls (zoom and rotation with multiple button clicks). Yet another is the lack of terminal where you can quickly enter command or value (like Autocad, Rhinoceros, etc.), power input is just not good enough.

You really have to explore your audience. Make appropriate examples that tease them, that trigger them to get "into the zone".

Last but not least, don't use the same trainings for people in different age groups. That's just wrong. People who've lived in different times (with this rate of technological progress) are interested in different things. For youngest people I suggest build examples that relate to video games. For a bit older, try examples that relate to 3d printing and practical objects and mechanisms. For older professionals with experience in other software, prepare examples that reflect their industry.

I believe 2 days is enough for a training to get started working with catia, in case there's more knowledgeable person they can ask while working. If you plan to teach them 2 days and drop them in the ocean with two punctured life-rafts like DS Online Documentation and the companion, then they are doomed to drown. They will get frustrated by catia be reluctant to ever try it again.

I hope this is helpful.

Best Regards,

Ivelin PEYCHEV

Hi,

Learning some part of the workflow it is indeed possible in 1-2 days. Having an overarching understanding is not possible in my opinion. 

Having said that, I agree with you that learning materials are extremely poor/lacking regarding CATIA. I am a software engineer that sometimes writes applications that interface with CATIA and I felt this need/lack of resources first hand. I do not plan to become an expert in CATIA, I just need to learn enough to test my software.

If I may offer a suggestion, borrowing from the success of StackOverflow for sw engineers, starting a strong community on StackExchange with topics, questions and answers in the same format would be very helpful. Note that their philosophy is very different from a forum. There the goal is to describe the question as well an succinctly as possible and getting the best and most complete possible answer with minimal discussion. In this way over time one can build a treasure trove of answers to common and not so common issues that everyone bumps in and that is easily searchable on the web.

Hi Gisela - I actually face the exact same issue/requirement from our employees. I lead the bulk of the trainings here at my company for 3DExperience, both on the web client, and occasionally the native client. 

Here's what I have learned: Edu Space is great if the users have the time and energy to search through all the courses. I constantly get emails about how the Edu Space content is for 2019x, 2021x, and 2022x - and not 2020x (which is what we have). The users get flustered when they spend time learning through Edu Space and then find that the function they are looking for in 2020x is not in the same place as in older or newer versions. Another common issue is that the tasks that Edu Space ask the users to perform, are slightly different from how our business operates. Again, this flusters the users as they learn something that is different from our standard operating procedure. They also want to know what our business processes look like, and how others in the same position have accomplished the tasks they are trying to do. In all honesty, I don't think a day long training course, or a textbook referral would do any good - I have seen that young mechanical engineers simply don't have time to sit through a course where they only need to learn a fraction of what is being told to them. 

What I have done to meet the gap: I have spent about a week of time preparing screen recordings showing the basic use cases that our engineers face. They are all ~5 minute videos, and I place them in a folders that are accessible to the whole company (on 3DSwym). This allows the users to pick and choose what they want to watch, and know the topic they will be learning in those 5 minutes. Note, I am NOT a CATIA expert, but from watching how our engineers work, and how the CATIA experts work, I have picked up on a few things that others could learn from. We have also built a highly custom platform, with various attributes, and lots of custom BI Essentials. Screen recording how the custom attributes behave, as well as how BI Essentials can show extremely valuable information, has proved rather successful for training. 

Note that this is for basic tasks such as creating an assembly, creating a duplicate, creating a branch, etc. NOT how to create the actual CAD. For this task, I refer to my colleagues who have more CATIA experience. Working collaboratively with them, I either create a screen recording of the training - or I will create a ~10 slide Powerpoint with screenshots, arrows pointing to key buttons/functions, and then upload to 3DSwym. For a more complete CAD training, I truly think YouTube is extremely valuable, and popular among us younger users. 

I've been delivering training on CATIA V5 for over twenty years and believe me when I say it takes at least 3 days for new users to at least become proficient at Sketching, let alone anything else more 'complex' than that. 

If you don't know the basic rudiments of how to construct and constrain 2D geometry then the resulting 3D geometry is worthless.

I face the exact same problem. We have had pretty good luck with using TATA as a remote, on-demand training / question answering service. I've found that fresh graduate engineers pick up CATIA a LOT faster than anyone who has a lot of experience in SolidWorks. It is definitely a painful experience to make the switch, but do-able. 

Matt

... agreement of all