Training New Patent Staff? Add Drawing Skills to Your Onboarding

Why Drawing Should Be Part of Patent Onboarding

Patent staff onboarding typically focuses on formality, docketing, and filing systems. But there’s one area that’s often overlooked—working with patent drawings.

When new team members can view, revise, and annotate drawings directly, they’re able to:

• Communicate more clearly with attorneys and inventors
• Make routine changes without outside help
• Understand how claims connect to visuals
• Speed up tasks that would otherwise be outsourced or delayed

These are not designer tasks — they’re essential skills for support roles in modern patent practice.

What Happens Without Drawing Skills?

Without drawing training, new staff often:

• Wait on others for simple changes (like fixing a reference number)
• Struggle to interpret diagrams during prosecution
• Avoid touching editable files, fearing they’ll “break” something
• Miss opportunities to reduce attorney workload

This results in extra rounds of review, more redlining, and longer response cycles — all of which are avoidable.

What Kind of Drawing Skills Are Actually Needed?

We’re not talking about CAD or graphic design. For most patent professionals, the following skills go a long way:

• Opening and navigating editable Visio drawings
• Adding or updating text labels and annotations
• Using simplified shape libraries to create new figures
• Cropping or scaling invention photos for filings
• Preparing or adjusting basic flowcharts and diagrams

These skills can be taught in hours — and used for years.

Why This Matters for Teams

Training staff in drawing tasks offers real operational benefits:

• Faster response times when drawing updates are needed
• Reduced workload on attorneys for routine figure edits
• Fewer communication breakdowns when preparing new filings
• Greater flexibility when combining internal and external drafting work
• Increased confidence across your team

In short, it turns new hires into contributors, not just coordinators.

A Practical Way to Build Drawing Confidence

IP DaVinci’s patent-focused Visio training is built specifically for onboarding:

• We skip non-relevant features and teach only what’s needed
• We use real patent examples — not generic flowchart tutorials
• We help staff build reusable workflows they can carry into daily work
• Tools like the Annotation Stencil make edits clean, fast, and compliant

This gives your team a shared visual language—and reduces reliance on redlines, screenshots, or repeated back-and-forth with drafters.