Cad Softwares

[Zholl]

In my personal experience, Inventor is probably the easiest of the four programs you've listed, with SolidWorks being a little more difficult (this could just be because Inventor was taught in engineering classes at my school). Creo is probably the most powerful of the three, but much more difficult to learn. I will say that Creo is what is used in the production facility I currently work at for designing plastic injection molds, and that it has the benefit of being able to create the CNC programs used without having to export data into another program. I don't know how worthwhile it would be to learn, though since you have mentors who do know it, perhaps learning it might not be too bad. Just keep in mind that it does have a steep learning curve, by my understanding. AutoCAD is a bit of a different beast altogether. In my own, somewhat limited experience with AutoCAD, I found that it was less about manipulating 3D objects and more about dealing with 2D drawings representative of 3D objects. I had quite a bit of trouble learning how to use it just because of the significant difference in paradigms from Inventor, which is what I learned first.

Now, all of that aside, definitely keep in mind that what your mentors can teach is a very important factor here. Learning basic CAD is one thing, but really knowing how to use the software opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, the team I graduated from and now mentor uses a good deal of stress analysis within Inventor during certain stages of design, which has saved a good deal of time and effort that otherwise would have been spent prototyping designs that can't hold up under the stress we expect to begin with, not to mention the help it is in designing components that are lighter but can still withstand loads. If your mentors are learning with you, you're not necessarily going to be using said functionality any time soon, so with this in mind I'd recommend choosing either Creo or Solidworks. Possibly sit down with those mentors you'd be working with and discuss your options as well, and ask them about pros and cons. They can probably explain any of that much better than any of us can over the net