Life Changing or Career Building?

The games industry is always evolving and adapting. Because it is an industry built on the premise of new technology, it is forever undergoing advancements whilst technology also advances. For this reason, it is quite an unstable medium- where films have stayed relatively unchanged over the past 70 years, games are almost entirely different from when they started. This makes it very difficult to teach people how to become part of that industry. By the time someone is taught the skills and knowledge base of the past few years in the industry, the world they will be looking for employment in could be very different. From new shaders to larger polycounts, our understanding of the gaming medium has to be as quick to change as it is.

As I said before, this makes teaching people ‘hard skills’ very difficult. Potential employees of the industry have to be able to adapt to new tech, sometimes completely different to what they may have learned. For this reason, I believe that it is much more important to equip future employees with the skills needed to seek out and acquire this information for themselves. In that way, they must be curious and engaged in what is happening in the industry and ideally they must be at the forefront of that advancement. They must be open and ready to learn the whole way through, be this a new kind of software or even a whole new demographic. A good example is how there is now a huge ‘casual’ audience that needs to be satisfied on things like mobile devices. If you were only expecting to make big triple A titles like Mass Effect or Call of Duty, you would never open yourself to a massive portion of the available jobs. We have to also be creative individuals who are not simply going to mimic the ideas that have come before. The more open you are the better you can be carved into the role you need to fit, whatever it will be. If you are highly trained but very rigid, you will find it more difficult 5 years from now when the gaming landscape is entirely different to what it is today.

On the other hand, if you are too open there is a chance you might not be useful to a team at all. At the end of the day, you need to be skilled in whatever you are doing to prove to an employer that you should be chosen for the job. No matter how ready you are to learn, that won’t mean you are valuable to a work force and if you can show you have the necessary skills then you are more likely to be an asset to the team. Ideally we have to ensure that potential employees have a mixture of both of these things- although that is very difficult to do. With enough determination, someone can become skilled at whatever they need to be. The most important factor is your drive and your mindset.