TECHNICAL DRAWING was Michael Clancy's best subject at school. Today he works as a piping draughtsman in the engineering consultancy company, Project Management Ltd, in Cork.
"I'd always get the top score in drawing all through school," he recalls. "I was the kind of person who didn't like school but I actually liked drawing. The day flies when you're stuck into a drawing. You Just don't feel the time going. There's a bit of thought going into it. I thought it was logical anyway. So I thought why not go for the career in it.
After his Leaving Cert at St Brogan's Vocational School in Bandon, Co Cork, he went to the Regional Technical College in Cork to study for a certificate in electrical and mechanical draughtsmanship. The two-year course, which has since changed and become a national certificate course in engineering (building services), concentrated at the time on the manual element of drafting and drawing.
"Computer aided design was only coming in then," he recalls. His training at this stage involved very little work on the computer. After graduating from Cork RTC, he worked with a small engineering consultancy company in Cork for almost two years where he continued to do all his drawings by hand.
As a result, when he started in Project Management Ltd as a CAD operator in March 1992, his experience of working with computers was very limited - "not worth talking, about", he says.
Nontheless, he values his earlier experience of using pencils and rulers and drawing boards. He believes that a background in manual drawing is essential. "You need that anyway. They prefer you to have a background In manual drawing and then you can go onto the computer."
The transition from manual draughtmanship to CAD was easy enough, although he did have in-house training and a gradual introduction to the kind of work he would be doing. Today he says: "It's like using a pencil."
The computer has become a useful tool. Its commands are easy and, for someone who was never into computers, Clancy has no problem with CAD.
"It's better than manual drawing," he believes. "It's way more advantageous." Sitting at his desk in Project Management, he keeps his hand on the mouse to pull down a menu and begin work on a lay-out drawing. Everything is computerised.
"You have to have CAD in all aspects of engineering," he says. "If you don't have CAD now you're in dire straits. All our drawings in all our departments are done on CAD."
Today Clancy is in the company's piping department, working on plans of pharmaceutical plants. When CAD came in first, he says, operators were expected only to input, to use the keys and just copy". They were not expected to understand the job or have any design input. This has changed.
One of the most satisfying aspects of his job is that he has been encouraged to develop a level of expertise and specialisation. There would be no job satisfaction with CAD, he says, without the scope to develop and specialise. "That would be like saying, you're a monkey, you don't understand the drawing," he says. "Who wants that. It's boring. You want to have a bit of an inputs yourself."
