A message from Paul Grayson
Chairman and CEO, Alibre Inc.
"It is all up to us entrepreneurs. It's the small businesses that are going to get America back on its feet again"
Richard Branson - Founder, Virgin Group Ltd.
Alibre Design customers are a very diverse group. They work for companies of all sizes, creating just about every imaginable product. Many are self-employed or work part time on the side doing design or manufacturing consulting. Working with these customers and learning about the innovative businesses and products that they have created is one of the most enjoyable aspects of working at Alibre.
Unfortunately, the employment picture in the United States has dimmed in the last year, with the number of jobs declining for 11 months in a row. However, Mechanical Engineering is one of the jobs least likely to be affected by a recession.
According to the Jobfox Top 25 Most Recession-Proof U.S. Job Candidates: October 2008 survey, Mechanical Engineering is the 9th most recession proof career, so mechanical engineers and designers are less likely to suffer during this economic downturn.
Small Business Job Creation
Depending on which statistics you use, between 70 and 90 percent of all new jobs in our country are created by small businesses.
According to the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses created 1.9 million jobs in 2004 (the most recent year for which they studied job creation.) Other notable statistics from an Oct. 2007 report from the Office of Advocacy include these:
- In 2006, the nation had an estimated 26.8 million small businesses, of which 6.1 million were employer firms. In other words, 20 million small businesses in the country have no employees.
- Small businesses employed 50.9 percent of the nation's non-farm private workforce in 2004.
You can look at what is going on in the economy and easily become depressed. But what does sitting around depressed accomplish? You didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it. All you can really do is accept the things you can't change and focus on changing those that you can. It is times like these that the entrepreneurial spirit of designers and engineers really shines, because just by focusing on the things that we do best, making great products and building innovative businesses that create new jobs, we can do more to help ourselves than all of the bailouts in Washington.
Read the rest of the post here.
Paul Grayson
This tech tip aims to provide specific information relating to the STL export options in Alibre Design. We’ll give some visual examples of what each parameter does as well as explain the effects.