Obviously my experience is skewed because of the sector of civil I'm involved with, but I would say that an understanding of what's going on in CAD is absolutely essential and an ability to draft efficiently is of very high importance.Įverything you ever do will have to be translated into part or construction drawings at some point in time. My guess would be that if I didn't increase in my efficiency a lot going forward, I would probably let go. As for me, I'm still learning commands and efficiency in CAD, but that's okay because I am not yet expected to be juggling as many things as others. Higher level engineers can absolutely not be the bottle-neck in the company because they are in charge of so many things at a single time. Without a good grasp of CAD, the engineers would be extremely inefficient with the plans. Once you become a project engineer or higher up, you most likely wont be drafting as much but you're still reviewing plans and changing things on a macro level in CAD (pipe networks, surfaces, etc). I can't speak for larger firms, but for us each and every person from my job (Junior Engineer) to the engineering manager all must be comfortable with CAD & Civil3D work. I am the newest employee of the company, so I obviously do a decent amount of drafting in addition to getting experience around the engineers themselves. We do the land development engineering for projects.

Autocad civil engineering