The Complete Guide to Becoming An Architectural and Civil Drafter

Chapter 1: What Does a Architectural and Civil Drafter Actually Do?

If someone asked you right now what an architectural and civil drafter does all day, you might picture a person hunched over a drafting table with a pencil, a T-square, and a roll of vellum paper. That image is about forty years out of date. You need to forget it.

The modern drafter is a person sitting in front of a powerful computer, using specialized software to turn rough sketches, redlines, and verbal instructions into precise, digital construction documents. These documents are the instructions that a construction crew on a building site, or a civil engineer planning a road, will use to actually build something. If an architect is the person who envisions a building, and an engineer is the person who calculates whether it will stand up, the drafter is the person who translates those visions and calculations into a language that everyone on the construction site can understand.

That language is the technical drawing, or more likely today, a set of layered digital drawings in a file called a CAD model. CAD stands for Computer-Aided Design, and it is the drafter's primary tool. You will likely spend the majority of your work hours inside one of a handful of specific CAD programs. The two most common are AutoCAD (which is used across both architecture and civil work) and Revit (which is used heavily in architecture and building systems because it allows for something called Building Information Modeling,