Life Changing or Career Building?

Developing skills that would be useful in the games industry. That’s what this course is meant to teach us. But what does that mean? What does the industry really want? We could be taught learning attributes, or the other hand we could be taught technical skills.

Soft skills “relate to a person's ability to interact effectively with co-workers and customers and are broadly applicable both in and outside the workplace”. This is a really useful to have, but alone it will not get you a job in the industry; you also need technical skills. Employers have started looking for people who have these skills, as they tend to work better with other people. However, this is not really something that you can teach, it’s something learnt through experience. 

Hard skills are “a person's skill set and ability to perform a certain type of task or activity”. These are technical skills, such as being able to build a model in 3ds max. These are really usefully, as they are needed to complete a job.

Making a course that works to train students for the games industry is really difficult. The field is constantly changing, so students have to be able to keep on learning and adapting. The quality of work they produce has to be really strong, as people already in the industry have really strong technical skills. There also seems to be a conflict from studios wanting people who are really good at technical skills and people with liberal arts backgrounds. It is difficult to say what the industry wants, or what it will want in say ten years time.

The way forward might be some kind of compromise, providing students with both the technical know how, the ability to adapt and change, and a good understanding of art fundamentals. Another difficulty is that different students would like different jobs. Some would like to be concept artists, others would like to focus more on 3D modelling. It would be difficult to balance the course to make sure that both sides of things take equal amounts of the time. The key is balance, to make sure students can get the best of what they want out of the course.

Soft skills are the most difficult. There is no real way to teach them. Working as part of a group helps, because it requires good communication. I’m not really sure how a course can teach or encourage the learning of these skills. It can however help people adapt to different situations. In an industry that needs people to constantly keep up with new programs and technology, this can be replicated in the classroom. If students are constantly asked to learn new technology, then they will getting better at learning and not being put off by new and different things.

There is also a pressure from the government side of things. The course needs a written part to qualify as a BA hons, but this doesn’t fit well with what we would be working on in the industry. It’s good to keep up with our writing skills, but in a job it is unlikely we will be writing a design document.