An Experience Like No Other: Get Hands-On Practice at the COE Annual Experience & TechniFair

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This post originally appeared in the Navigate the Future blog and was written by Roger Joyal, an Engineering Customer Service Specialist at Textron Aviation.

COE — a Community Of Experts — using Dassault Systèmes products to innovate, design and manufacture your company’s products. Did you know COE is 100 percent run and managed by user-companies like yourself? Every member of the COE Board of Directors, Conference Planning Committee chairs, Division Managers and Committee Chairs are all volunteers from user-companies.

I have been volunteering for COE for almost 20 years, starting as a committee chair, then the Information Management Division Manager for eight years and the last few years as a Conference Planning Committee chair. Through these years, the COE experiences have all been memorable to me. It’s amazing when reflecting on the plethora of job-related knowledge a COE member can gain through year-round activities, the COE website and the COE Annual Experience & TechniFair which is just around the corner, April 15-18 in San Diego, California. Honestly, the information gained and making of contacts with other experts is downright priceless.

The COE Annual Experience & TechniFair has become even more exciting over the last few years. We can quickly develop a full grid of 130 conference sessions and still receive numerous requests from others to present their knowledge and know-how at COE. While it is too late to add sessions to this year’s conference, this continuous excitement shows how valuable COE is to users for sharing tips, techniques and lessons learned.

As a past COE Top Gun winner, I am excited there will be a new opportunity for attendees to have fun while learning by competing in the 3DDerby Competition. This opportunity takes the Top Gun experience beyond just creating a part and includes many others who are not daily CATIA users. While sign-ups  have closed you can still learn about the competition here. Looking forward to the races at the conference!

What’s more, COE will once again offer certification exams at the Annual Experience & TechniFair. This year, in addition to the three Associate Exams previously offered, we have added three Expert Exams. This will expand the certification offerings to include Associate- and Expert-level exams for Part Design, Assembly Design and Surface Design for V5. We will also have a teaser opportunity for the brand new 3DEXPERIENCE Mechanical Design Essentials certification exam. This is a full three-hour exam, so this year we will offer 10-15 minute time slots for users to preview the exam and see exactly what is entailed. We hope this will entice users to take the exam in the future, whether at COE or at one of the numerous Dassault Systèmes Certification Centers around the country.

These hands-on certification exams provide an opportunity for users to prove first-hand their abilities within the Dassault Systèmes’ software applications. We hope our member companies can begin to benefit from these exams by explicitly showing the skill level of existing and future employees. They also provide an excellent opportunity for new graduates to show their skillset in a meaningful and consistent way. COE is proud to offer these exams at the lowest available price of $50 per exam for Industry members, and at no cost for COE Academic members. You can learn more about the exams here.

Finally, if you have a significant number of V5 design files that you’d like to seamlessly use on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, then you’ll want to attend the Power’By hands-on workshop and see how easy it can be.

So, why should you attend the COE Annual Experience & TechniFair? That’s an easy answer — this conference is jam-packed with the best user presentations and hands-on training sessions in the world regarding the Dassault Systèmes product suite. There have been countless hours of volunteer time committed to COE just for you. I have witnessed this year’s conference being assembled from the very beginning. I have no doubt that this will be an enriching experience and your colleagues will be just as excited about what you will have learned when you head home from this year’s conference.

Thanks to Nathan Shipley from the CAD/CAM Laboratory at the National Institute for Aviation Research, Wichita State University, for contributing to this story.

To learn more about COE 2018 click here:

 

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Katie Corey

Katie is the Editor of the SIMULIA blog and also manages SIMULIA's social media and is an online communities and SEO expert. As a writer and technical communicator, she is interested in and passionate about creating an impactful user experience. Katie has a BA in English and Writing from the University of Rhode Island and a MS in Technical Communication from Northeastern University. She is also a proud SIMULIA advocate, passionate about democratizing simulation for all audiences. Katie is a native Rhode Islander and loves telling others about all it has to offer. As a self-proclaimed nerd, she enjoys a variety of hobbies including history, astronomy, science/technology, science fiction, geocaching, true crime, fashion and anything associated with nature and the outdoors. She is also mom to a 2-year old budding engineer and two crazy rescue pups.