<p>Or do they leave all that mess up to the CAD guys? I really don’t want to design crap in CAD. Ha.</p>
<p>Depends on the job and the company you work for. A Prof at my school basically sums it up as this. If you work for a large company chances are there will be some CAD department that will take care of that stuff for you, if you work for a smaller company, chances are you won’t have that luxury and will end up doing it yourself. Seems logical to me.</p>
<p>I’m one of six structurals here at my branch and we’ve got two CAD techs, out of our eleven total employees, including support staff.</p>
<p>Some of the CAD stuff I’ve got to do, but honestly, all I’ve done is circle stuff on plans and hand it back to our CAD techs. They do the vast majority of the drawing. Typically, you just have to know how to <em>edit</em> CAD files, and the CAD files you work on are ones that are originally drawn up by the CAD techs.</p>
<p>That being said, be nice to your CAD techs. 
They can bottom-pile you if you cheese them off.</p>
<p>I agree. At larger companies, you probably don’t need to do much CAD work. However, at smaller companies, such as where I’m finishing an internship at, it can be necessary to do CAD if no outside company will be able to do it. I ran into that situation just today. I get to design a new road in CAD after I get the survey and the specs for the centerline in a few days. This road is important to helping another major employer that makes automobile parts improve its infrastructure. So in conclusion, assume that CAD is important, because it generally will help you, particularly at small companies.</p>
<p>It depends on what you do. I’ve designed a number of circuits the ‘old fashioned’ way (paper, pencil, templates) and also with the use of a circuit design application. It’s much easier to do with the application since it’s easier to make changes, move things around, duplicate things, etc. It’s really synonymous with pencil/paper versus Microsoft Word - it’s just easier to use the app. After designing the circuit, I’d hand it off to another group or company that does the circuit board layout (again on a CAD system). The people doing the board layout weren’t engineers but some of them were very skilled at what they did. Learning the CAD system wasn’t a big deal - I just taught myself in a short timeframe from reading the material with the app.</p>