Hey ladies and gents,

I’m going to start of with my humble opinion: if you don’t get these exams for free, it is not worth taking them. They serve no purpose. Nobody has ever heard of them, I’m not even sure it’s worth putting on your resume unless you finished expert. They aren’t all that impossible to pass. What they do is force you to learn and be proficient at every aspect of Solidworks.

That aside, if you aren’t sure what the exams are, I recommend just googling it and going to the SW website, it’s fairly straight forward.

What’s not straight forward is how you actually take the exams, and this has many aspects. First off, vouchers for free exams are everywhere. If you are a student and your school uses Solidworks, it has vouchers. If you bought the student ($100) or military student ($20) versions, it comes with a voucher for both CSWA and CSWP. If your company has a subscription through a value-added reseller, you get three exams biannually. More on this:

There’s instructions for redeeming these vouchers out there, ask your reseller. Once you redeem them, you have something like 6 months to use them, which means if you roll over the biannual date (1JAN and 1JUL) you could potentially take 6 exams in a row. Caveat: it’s not any three exams. It’s one from each pool: CSWA/CSWP, one of the five pre-reqs for the CSWE, and one from a pool of extras.

For instance, I have the military student version at home that came with the above mentioned vouchers. I used one for the CSWA this last weekend. I also work for a company with several subscriptions. After linking one of the serial numbers with my MySolidworks or whatever the heck it is, I redeemed vouchers for the CSWP, surfacing, and CAM exams. I have 6 months to take them. I also have a voucher from some random solidworks event for one free exam, but I’m not exactly sure what it entails, so more to come.

As for actually taking the exam, there’s a program you download, and that is where you put in the voucher code. That easy.

I’ll jot my thoughts on each exam as I do them, pass or fail. The plan is to hit CSWE in January when and if I pass all the prereqs.