Every year, I track e-mail from readers to note CAD management trends. Trends come and go, but the most frequently asked questions always have to do with employment parameters, including compensation, management authority, and user-support burdens. To answer these types of questions, I started the annual CAD management survey in 2000. Over the years, I've added categories to and yielded interesting conclusions from the survey, and this year's result stays true to form.

Please remember that I'm not a professional pollster. I'm just trying to gauge what's going on and get the information to you readers so you can make intelligent decisions about your career based on market information. I hope you find the results valuable.

The Survey Itself

The CAD Manager's Survey was conducted during September 2007 and was advertised in the CAD Manager's News-letter, industry blogs, and any discussion forum to which I could post. The survey was designed to track financial metrics such as salaries and bonuses while also measuring job skills, job security, frustrations, and the financial stability of participants' employers. My goal remained unchanged from prior surveys: I wanted to gather enough data about CAD managers to draw conclusions about how we should all plan for our future careers. If you'd like to review the full survey, you can do so at http://www.cad-manager.com/survey.htm.

Random responses from 685 readers were compiled into an Excel spreadsheet for sorting and computation of means, averages, and deviations.

Job Titles

Figure 1. Job title.

Of all respondents, 63% responded that their job title was CAD manager, slightly less than the 68% tallied last year. The remaining respondents identified themselves as designers (11%), CAD technicians (8%), engineers/architects (10%), IT/IS managers (3%) and other (5%), as shown in figure 1.

Figure 2. CAD manager job status.

The continued trend observed in the survey data (figure 2) is that four out of 10 CAD managers don't have CAD management as their primary task; instead, they are professionals in the company who are being pressed into CAD management duties. As compared with last year's data, the only substantial trend has been away from primary CAD managers (down from 68%) to using more engineers, designers, and architects (up from 7%). In fact, the drop in CAD manager titles is exactly offset by those same engineers, designers, and architects. The percentages of all other job titles remained essentially static when compared with last year's survey data.

Further breaking down demographics, 47% of respondents reported full-time CAD management duties (way up from 33% last year), with the remaining 53% reporting a part-time split between CAD management tasks and production responsibilities, as shown in figure 2. This year's data represents a seismic shift toward full-time CAD management. I noted a trend toward full-time CAD management in last year's survey, but I am shocked at how fast the workplace has moved in this regard.