3D CAD Jobs

There is little doubt that SolidWorks is the most popular mid-range MCAD system. Some point to job listings to show how much a MCAD system is in demand and hence is being used. Others think that job listings is not the right way to go about figuring out popularity.

Yesterday a SolidWorks reseller sent me the following email:

Attached is a table I compiled yesterday of job postings in the USA that include the following keywords:

• SolidWorks
• Catia
• Autodesk Inventor
• Pro/Engineer or Pro/E (Creo only came up with 69 hits)
• Unigraphics or NX
• Solid Edge

I used www.indeed.com to perform my searches. Indeed.com compiles job postings from numerous sources, and seems to give the highest number of total results. I did not filter the job postings for only a single specific CAD product keyword. If multiple CAD products were referenced, they were included in each respective products results. I’ve also color coded the cells based on the relative number of jobs per state, by product. Green is good, red is bad! The purpose of this exercise was to see which states in the US were posting the highest number of openings, and to compare the results of the primary 3D MCAD applications used.

You can download the PDF attachment from here.

What I found most interesting was the comparison between SolidWorks and CATIA. Going by this job listing logic, it looks like SolidWorks has beaten the crap out of CATIA in the US. In fact, in this comparison CATIA came in third after Pro/ENGINEER. In spite of what people say about Pro/ENGINEER, at least in this comparison it looks pretty healthy to me. NX is half as healthy as SolidWorks. Inventor looks a bit sick and Solid Edge appears to be in coma. 😉

What do you think? Are job listings the right way to figure out popularity. If not, then what is?