Evan on Engineering Software

The online job search engine, www.indeed.com, has an intriguing job trends graphing function.  I was curious about what it might say about CAD jobs, so I put in a query on the major mechanical CAD products:

To get this to work right, I had to use various spellings for product names -- for example, people often misspell "SolidWorks" as "Solid Works".

Fortunately, people don't often misspell "Inventor".  But, unlike the other CAD products, people do use the word "Inventor" in senses that do not necessarily refer to an MCAD product.

I was curious how these other uses might affect the results, so I ran a test with some additional filters.  I figured that most folks looking for CAD users would use words in their ads such as "designer", "drafter", "engineer", and such.  So, I did a little trial and error work, and found a list of words that returned pretty much all the desired results, but not the extraneous ones:

What's interesting here is that there is a peak in the use of the word "Inventor" that started last April.  A bit of checking, and I found that a job placement company started using a tagline in their ads that said "we're inventors!"  Ignoring this larger effect, the small gap between the two lines is due to job postings for patent attorneys and such.

Here's the query, adjusted to return only Inventor CAD references:

It's interesting to compare Inventor to its direct competitor, SolidWorks.  But I don't feel too sorry for Autodesk.  Look what happens when you add AutoCAD to the query:

If you'd like to try running your own queries, feel free to use mine as a starting point.