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My son taught himself CAD while getting an architectural design degree. The university required the purchase of an expensive laptop computer and expensive CAD programs, but failed to actually place CAD courses in the curriculum.

My son ignored the bias toward manual drafting, did most of his work on the computer. His grades suffered, but once out of school he had a design job in New York within a couple of weeks. He continued his schooling at CUNY and developed a presentation for the recent AIA convention.

As far as I can tell, many of his classmates that didn't teach themselves computer skills are stuck in low-level drafting jobs, or have moved out of architecture altogether.

All the draftsmen I know, and I know quite a few in the local market, have taught themselves CAD and very early when peecees were new and AutoCAD was version 9 or something. Many bought their own computers and software even though it was significantly expensive, since the companies did not see the benefits right away. The product of the AutoCAD classes generally does not find employment drafting for some reason, but born draftsmen always show up with CAD skills now. Engineers just starting out may do drafting for a while, and they are usually fairly adept, even though they will move on fairly soon.