Behind the Design: Dino Pečenjev, Pushing Through the Wall, Even When It’s Hard
In 2011, one of Dino Pečenjev’s engineering professors tasked his university students to design and manufacture any product from start to finish. Dino and his friends thus teamed up to make the strangest thing they could think of: a car-towing box that could be powered from the same car’s battery.
When they struggled to design part of the project with their university’s CAD software, their professor made an off-hand comment that would change the course of Dino’s life, even though at the time, he didn’t know it yet: “You could easily do that in SOLIDWORKS.”
And so, they did.
Dino had been building things and taking them apart again long before his professor ever mentioned SOLIDWORKS. He grew up in a small town in Croatia, about 40 miles from Zagreb, where his father owned a mechanics shop. As a child, Dino assumed that soon enough, he’d either become an architect or trade in his Legos for wrenches and join the family business. He even attended a vocational school but then decided to enroll in college to study mechatronics.
He and his friends designed the car-towing box there, and his professor mentioned SOLIDWORKS. However, attending a vocational school rather than a college prep institution made his studies an uphill battle from the start, especially the electrical engineering classes. That, plus health complications, drove Dino to drop out of the program and return to his father’s shop.
He worked in the family business for a few years before deciding to try university again. This time, he enrolled at the University of Applied Sciences Velika Gorica to study motor vehicles. More health complications led to another false start, but Dino ultimately re-enrolled and persevered.
The university provided CAD licenses, but it wasn’t SOLIDWORKS, which Dino had previously used to complete the car-towing box project and also occasionally used to avoid sketching technical drawings by hand.
“So, we asked the university to get SOLIDWORKS,” Dino explained, “and they did. And that’s when my life took quite a big turn.”
Dino remembers how much easier it was to specifically make a spiral helix for a worm gear tooth in SOLIDWORKS than in other software.
“You just put in the parameters, and it did it for you!” he laughs.
The university didn’t have proper SOLIDWORKS classes, however, just some optional courses. Dino attended all of them, and when they ended, he realized he wanted to learn more. The following September, he passed the CSWA, and two weeks after that, he passed the CSWE.
Towards the end of his university studies, he interned at a company called DOK-ING, which manufactures de-mining machines to work in areas still at risk of leftover mines from Croatia’s War of Independence. He used SOLIDWORKS while working, and it was his first experience with SOLIDWORKS PDM – without which, he specifies, it would have been impossible to tackle a project of that scale.
When Dino returned to school after his internship, he powered through another series of SOLIDWORKS certificates, including Advanced Weldments and Sheet Metal. Then, two weeks before the Covid pandemic shut the world down, Dino got a special call.
He was working in his dad’s mechanic shop when he got a call from the SOLIDWORKS reseller in Croatia who asked if he was interested in applying for a job. They’d been keeping track of all his accumulated certificates. Dino, of course, said yes.
“I was thrilled,” he remembered. He passed his surfacing certification the night before his interview, a boost to his resume that his coworkers later told him was pivotal to his acceptance. Dino was offered the position that he accepted, and the rest of his life started.
“My brother asked me, ‘You know you got a job just two weeks before the lockdown? Do you realize how lucky you are?’” Dino remembers. “And I said, I know. I got lucky, and I’m aware of it, and I’m taking advantage of it.”
In 2022, he was awarded the Elite Applications Award. A short while later, he was accepted into the SOLIDWORKS Champions Program, and in 2023, he attended 3DEXPERIENCE World in Nashville. His ex-professor even asked him to start part-time teaching SOLIDWORKS at his alma mater.
“The world just got so much bigger,” Dino admits. “Everything is moving in the right direction.” Today, Dino is 31 and is still learning and improving every day. He has his eyes set on career goals – like hopefully becoming a SOLIDWORKS Champion of the year one day – but also on practical life goals, like buying a house.
So, how did a twice-college dropout finally make it?
“I would tell anyone, don’t give up when you fail. You just have to push through the wall. If you have a goal, go with it. Even if it’s hard – it will pay off.”
Margherita Bassi