I did my Btech(BE) in mechanical from NITcalicut. At the end of my third year, I decided to improve on my resume to make it appealing for core companies from mechanical visiting for placement the next year. Since I could not do much about my marks, I decided to do a course on CAD software during the vacations.
After some enquiries I found out that there are a lot of institutes offering training in Autocad, but only CADD center was offering mechanical software packages like Pro/e , Nastran, etc..
I decided to enrol for Pro/e+Autocad -the fees was something around 14k.
I started with pro/e . my instructor was a fresh mech graduate who was unable to land a better job for himself. He had learned Pro/e from the same institute some time ago. His knowledge in it was rather shaky and there were quite a lot of instances when he was unable to answer my queries.
The PCs available fared no better. Design and analysis software are huge and require a large amount of system resources esp RAM. The pcs in which I was working had only 256 mb ram which made working with complicated models very.slow. But even worse was the lack of any power backup. There were atleast one power outage a day and it was rather painful to watch your last two hour’s work vanishing in front of your eyes.
After two months or so my final year started and soon I got a job in Tata motors. I was fed getting frustrated by the institute by then and reluctantly went back to finish my course. There was a new instructor for Pro/e who was better than the earlier one. The Autocad instructor was also competent. There seemed to be some upgrades done for the pcs but still no power backup. Finally I decided that enough was enough. I gave my complete course fee and recieved my certificate in pro/e and autocad which certified that I had done a major project in both of them ( which ofcourse I didn’t do)
Conclusion
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If you want to develop(and market) some skills on computer aided design/analysis, the best thing would be to get a certification by the parent company itself. But it might be difficult and exp to get certifications in india by these companies.The next option is to go to institutes like CADD center and get a certification by them. In my opinion , these certificates are worth nothing and the only thing that you would be able to gain is the knowledge. If you have a pc at home try to get a copy of the particular s/w(btw, CADD center uses a pirated version even when they tell that they have licensed versions available) and try to learn it yourself!