Who doesn’t love a good certification test? Thousands of GrabCAD Community badge holders and certified Solidworks users can’t be wrong. As we put the finishing touches on GrabCAD Print, it occurred to us that the only thing missing was a good certification test. Sure you can tell people that you’re better than them at using Print. But why ask others to take your word for it when you can waive a shiny GrabCAD Print Certified badge in their face? And, of course, by “waive in their face” I mean “politely link them to your Community profile.”
You might be thinking to yourself “ok, I like certification tests, but perhaps the test is so difficult that only GrabCAD/Stratasys employees have any chance of passing it.” Not so. Allow me to prove it to you.
As of last week, JC Gandiaga at CADD Edge (now a TriMech company) became the first “outsider” to become GrabCAD Print certified. He said it was tough, but obviously not impossible. I hopped on the phone and asked him a little about the certification process and how he’s getting along with the GrabCAD Print beta so far.
Hey JC. Do you mind introducing yourself real quick?
I’m a presales application engineer. I spend a lot of time gathering information for new products, figuring out which materials to use on a specific application, and ultimately working with customers and prospects to figure out the ideal solution for them.
Where do you get your info when doing materials research?
I was a manufacturing process engineer in a former life, so having that background and aptitude is very helpful. Otherwise, the training and info available via MyStratasys is very helpful. When all else fails, I can always reach out to one of Stratasys’ application engineers.
How are you using GrabCAD Print so far?
We have a lot of printers in my office (based in Connecticut) - a Fortus 380, Fortus 400, uPrints, Connex, and two Objet 3 pros. Every office has a printer - Dimension or a uPrint, etc. The other two offices that I interact with regularly are in TN and VA.
Right now we use GrabCAD Print for scheduling so we don’t double-book benchmarks for prospects. There’s no more emailing between offices. The scheduling feature really gets rid of bottlenecks. I can also see what’s in the queue, so if I need to warm up a particular machine for a print, I can do that ahead of time.
I still print from an STL for individual parts because I’m used to it. But for assemblies I print directly from CAD because it’s way faster. If a prospect has four different parts, it takes five minutes total instead of five minutes per part.
What did you think of the certification process?
It was a tricky process and I did sit through training provided by Shuvom Ghose, GrabCAD Go to Market Engineer. The test is pretty intuitive and reminds me a little of how Solidworks does it. It’s very well designed. I’m pretty sure I got one of the exercises wrong - I didn’t know how to move stuff around easily. But that pushed me to learn how to figure out.
I’m working on convincing my colleagues to get certified. I’m always pushing people to use printers more, so this is a nice way to do that.
So what are you waiting for?
Take the test here and get certified. Learn something about GrabCAD Print that you didn’t know before! You can take the test as many times as you want (or need to). And don’t forget to tell your colleagues.
