Its fairly easy to learn. It took me about 2 hours to pick it up but I had been using Pro Engineer for 3 years. One of our draftsmen went from AutoCAD to Inventor and it took him 6 weeks to get confident but then again another one of our draftsmen went from AutoCAD to Inventor in a couple of days.
People in our office have found that its easier to pick up if there are other people around who know the program and can help you right away when you have a problem.

I'd do the training course. Its not that hard and you've got nothing to loose.

Cheers,

Andy

I don't think it's a question of how hard Inventor is, but rather how hard is it going to be for you to unlearn AutoCAD.

Ray Reynolds
Senior Designer
Read: FAQ731-376
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."

Good point! The people in our office always say that they keep going back to the AutoCad way of doing things and wonder why its not working.

Once you are very familiar with any CAD system, its hard to break away. AutoCAD is not a bad platform I reckon, its just gotten too many ways of achieving the same goal, and too many (albiet often needed)options which baffle many, yet comfort the experienced users.
 I dont think its different if you were moving from any CAD package to another one.
 From what Ive played with so far using Inventor, its very clean and easy to manouvre around the menu's....I think theyve got a smashing layout there on the whole, and beats a lot of other software for intuitivity. Theres even design doctor and flag up references on unfrequent or new commands.

 I reckon it would be very easy to learn, however, as with any MCAD package, the mindset of sketch>constrain>model>assemble>3d constrain>documentation from just 'drawing it' is the real transition.


See ya

Sirius2.

I have been an AutoCad User for 10 Years, and found Inventor fairly easy to learn and use.  The biggest issue that we have had to deal with is hardware.  Inventor is very specific in the graphics card requirements,  and the number of part, drawing, and assembly files will use up a lot more hard drive space.  File/Project management is a little funny too, but you can get used to it.