What would a typical career path be?
Graduates or advanced students would normally be likely to take a job as a draftsman with an established firm. At the same time most people start working extra hours creating designs under their own names to sell as stock plans. Work at any particular firm may vary significantly. It is likely that a junior draftsman may be laid off occasionally and need to switch to another firm. This normally continues until you become valuable enough so that firms are increasingly reluctant to lay you off. For our graduates this should be a relatively short period as you will normally be quite useful to a firm from the start. At the same time, as you are becoming more valuable to established design firms, you will probably be earning more and more money from your own plans sales and it will become less and less urgent to immediately find another position if you are laid off. Somewhere in this process you may start getting your own custom design commissions. Eventually some firm will offer you a partn
