Autodesk Inventor Professional

It was when I landed my first job in 2010, I got the opportunity to work on Autodesk Inventor. It was the very first time I was using this program as frankly until then I was even unaware of its existence. 

During college, the programs me and most of my classmates went about learning apart from AutoCAD of course were Solidworks, Unigraphics and Pro-E. And yes, some I remember went for Catia as well, but I am not sure if I heard anyone going for Inventor then. It wasn't any popular, may be I guess for the reason that the program doesn't have much of an application in the automotive industry, where most us wished to land jobs in.

Anyways, as I started getting my hands on the program, I found it pretty simple to use. The user interface was pretty straight forward as you would expect from any CAD program, and hence in no time, I was pretty comfortable with it.

Its not a very precise software, and when I say that I mean its not something you will look at if you want to set every individual parameter of the design by yourself, because there are a lot of factors that are set to one default setting and which you don't get an option to change in Inventor, unlike other programs like ProE or Unigraphics for that matter, and probably that's why its not used much in a precision oriented industry like automotive. But on the same time, for not so precision oriented industries, like the one's I have been associated with, it does an excellent job and is a great program.

In 2014, since I was using it for a few years now, the company I was associated with, gave me the opportunity to get certified in the program, which I found a bit unusual because I knew a lot of companies invest in getting their employee's trained on the CAD programs they used (which makes sense) but hadn't heard of any to invest in their employees to go about the certification in a CAD program. Anyways, that's how I became an official Inventor Professional Certified user, which I must say helped me a lot with my career, as I am sure there are a lot of Inventor trained professionals in the market out there but there are hardly any who are certified, and which definitely gives you an edge.

So it's my advise to all those CAD enthusiasts to do go about the official certification in whatever CAD program you work with. Its not something you definitely need to, but in my experience if you do, certainly gives you an upper edge.