Short Sharp Trainings

Short Sharp Trainings

Short Sharp Trainings are produced by Jonathan Pickup of Archoncad Limited,the leading
third party trainer for Vectorworks, and they are designed to help a Vectorworks user build
his/her skill level with a minimum investment of time and money. The trainings are based
upon a monthly webinar session between Jonathan and a small group of users, and take the
form of demonstrations by Jonathan and questions and answers between the participants
and Jonathan. Jonathan addresses the topics to the users' specific areas of interest, based on
their occupations and work styles. After the monthly session takes place, Jonathan turns the
content into a well organized, downloadable PDF manual that has a variety of useful video
clips imbedded into it. Subscribers to the monthly webinars have access to past topics and
they are also for sale at a very modest price to non-subscribers (something like $22
american).

Topics of the short sharps that I've read/watched/used/referred to include: 3D modelling,
complex roof design, building libraries, construction details, annotation, building an asset
data base, construction documents, using the camera match tool, site modelling.... I find
these trainings to be exactly geared to my attention span and memory. Most trainings take
me between 30 and 90 minutes to go through initially, including practice exercises, and then
I'll typically refer back to them sporadically as I integrate the new techniques into my tool
chest of skills. Jonathan has been very generous with his time in answering questions that
come about as a result of building new skills and using the software at a much higher level.
Along with the monthly sessions, I typically download one or two back issues a month to use
and review - depending on what I'm working on in my day to day. As each new project or part
of a project comes up, I'll try to" sharpen" a skill relevent to it. When I started the small house
that I'm working on now, I started tweaking my libraries, resource browser, defaults,
workspaces, title blocks... all from skills in "building a library" and "customizing vectorworks"
- short sharp trainings. On one of my last jobs that had a complicated site plan, I reviewed the
"building site plans" training before starting, and the site plan went easier and smoother than
it ever had before.

I would highly recommend the short sharp trainings to anyone who wants to sharpen their
own skill-set, especially given that the investment is so modest and the potential benefits are
so great.