I am not a IE engineer.
But due to a career change, I have to get into generators/motors and their control electronics.
But before that, I had a pretty good career designing and building shops (40/70 per year) for a French company.
When they hired me, they had one or two licenses for an old version of Autocad LT.
Within a year I had them buy 5 full licenses of Autocad.
I made a custom version (getting rid of the stupid standard UI they have since the 2004 version) that made work fast and fun.
Multilayer blocks and groups, simple workflow etc etc...
I think they even have a couple of copies of Mechanical desktop now too...
Overall, more than 50 000 Euros (with upgrades).
And why could I do this?
Because I had taught myself Auto-cad with the version 14 for free...
It was suspiciously easy to crack, but the cracked version was not updated and a bit buggy/crashy, not fit for work but great for students. Almost like it had been done on purpose.
But, I think that everybody in my year asked for - and got - a full version in their first ever job.
We were useless without it!
I don't even get me started with some 3D software you have to pay seminars to learn it:
Meaning you need to pay an engineer 3 months to do nothing, pay many 1000's of euros for the software JUST TO RUN A TEST TO SEE IF THE SOFTWARE FITS THE BLOODY COMPANY!
Who's going to pay for that? You've just limited your client base to a few mega corps. STUPID STUPID STUPID.
Offer a free limited version, the engineers will learn it on their own time modeling tree houses/go karts for their kids...
Then run a small scale test with a 45 day trial version!
WINNER!
So I totally agree with Dave:
If I had a free version of Altium, even limited to a 50 by 50mm 2 layered design, I would learn with that.
But like the other cheap schmucks, I'm going to get Eagle, and one year form now, get my company to buy that when I get hired.