NXOpen Career Trajectories

We have just completed another successful round of NXOpen training for a client - in this case the course was tailored to their particular requirements / industry. The Engineering manager followed up after the second session with a few questions - one of which really sparked me thinking.

Looking to the future, can you summarise what the pre-requisites are for future colleagues to take this training programme? How much experience do they need? Is it enough to be ‘interested’, or should they have done some coding already?

So what follows is my rumination on what makes a good candidate to become an NXOpen programmer.

Programmer vs Engineer?

A driver pulls up in a remote road next a fellow chewing a bit of straw and leaning on a gate. The driver leans out of his car and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Haworth” The fellow on the gate, pauses, slowly takes the straw from his mouth before replying, “if you wanna go there you don’t want to be leaving from here”

In Rolls-Royce this was a perennial discussion - should we be taking Computer scientists and teaching them Engineering? OR Taking Engineers and teaching them the programming? As with my bad joke - I don’t think there is a right place to start from here - rather the key is you have someone smart who is keen to learn the programming (or engineering). Most engineering companies have young eager engineering graduates some of whom are keen to learn code … but not many engineering organisations have spare programmers lying around. Either way that hunger to learn is key. If this is foisted upon the graduate as an extra task its not going to work out - if instead it feeds into their existing interests and motivations your improve your chances for success.

Ideally of course you want both - a computer scientist (or at least an experienced programmer) kicking around helps .

Engineers trajectory

I have taught many Engineers to code in NXOpen. Have a look at this graph - each line being a notional engineer learning NXOpen.

No trainee comes out of the blocks as a usefully productive NXOpen coder - over time as their knowledge levels rise they enter the ‘region of productivity’ shown in grey.

Accelerators (Green)

The green folks learn quickly, they are super smart and then go beyond / get bored. Before you know it they are working for a machine learning consultancy.

Not my cup of tea (Red)

Struggle to learn the concepts and eventually give up without ever having become productive.

• No intrinsic motivation to learn

  I have had managers attend my courses who, from the outset, knew that they would never actually apply what they were learning.
  I have had engineers who were ’enrolled’ but had no interest in code and liked their day job just the way it was. Without the desire to learn they will not succeed.

• The benefits of learning don’t map back to their day job or identity

  If course attendees cannot see that this will actually benefit them, or save their team effort, the motivation to succeed is seriously diminished.

Do you have an NX automation or customisation requirement - get in touch! [paul.booth@turtlestack.net]