Career Building
Building a career is an infinite process that involves forging your path, sometimes that path is winding, sometimes it is forked, sometimes it’s it’s even blocked. The way you take does not always lead to your intended destination but if you must keep moving or time will pass you bye and the windows of opportunity which are open will close.
Learning to face reality and make decisions is a critical part of not just building a career but life. The following video by Raymond Dalio (Investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist (https://www.principles.com) steps through essential principles which are valuable to anyone aspiring to be successful and gain the most out of life.
Measure Where You Stand
“Rather than thinking, ‘I’m right.’ I started to ask myself, ‘How do I know I’m right?” - Ray Dalio.
Many people endeavor upon a specific career often have no idea what the core tasks required in the execution of that role are, thus they have no idea how their performance measures up against an industry professional performing that role at the appropriate level.
Without this understanding an attempt at entering industry when not up to industry standard is damaging to your prospects, it is essential to measure your level to make sure you are in the ballpark before attempting to transition to industry.
The Gauge
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training.” - Archilochus
The gauge is simple, can you produce industry-level deliverables within a commercial time frame?
Regardless of whether you think the answer is yes or no you have to prove it.
Investigate the requirements of a specific industry task and define the success criteria, then execute a similar task focusing on meeting the success criteria (Define what you measure then measure it). When performing the task, you must treat time as if it is in a workplace working an 8 hour days; you must track all the time you spend on the task and work on the task for a minimum of 2 hours at a time without a break. Take as many 2 hour sessions as needed until the task is complete (Note: These 2-hour sessions do not have to be in a continuous sequence like a real workplace unless you have the time to do so).
When the task is complete pass the work for review by a third party, amend any issues they have then pass it back through the review cycle until approved.
Once approved tally all the time spent producing the work then check if that was a reasonable amount of time to spend completing that task (Mentor, information reference, etc).
As a guide for a junior, you want to produce a minimum 80% of the quality of an industry professional in a professional timeframe using industry tools and best practices.
Ability Tests
Many games companies send out tests or challenges for designers, artists and programmers with time frames for applicants to complete to weed out those who are not up to the required standard.
Example KPI question for a producer, product lead, game designer
On a typical day, we have on average 1,389 installs. On June 1st, we launch an ad campaign that receives 113,000 impressions, with CTR = 2.3%, and CVR = 9.2%. CPM was $12. On June 1st, the total number of installs was 1618.
What is the estimated ROI of this campaign, if our ARPU is $12.22?
Example art question for game designer
Find three artists from art station or deviant art that you think would be good candidates for creating concept art for a game called Royal Tokyo Monster Battle. Please provide links to their pages and ensure that the artists are not from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, UK or USA.
Art Tests
Companies such as Naughty Dog are famous for setting art tests for applicants with detailed briefs, strict conditions and non-disclosure agreements in place (Sample test submission below).
A Guide In Filling The Gaps
The following checklist is a brief guide on how you can approach filling the gaps to be industry ready;
Define what you need to achieve to reach your objective.
Examine the journey of a relevant industry professional and map the path which lead them to where they are today.
Identify the skills, experience, and tools relevant industry professionals have that you see as being beneficial for your career journey.
Identify the knowledge required to form these skills and experiences.
Identify learning overlap and dependencies then prioritise learning according to the effort, value, and urgency.
Acquire the relevant learning resources, tools and mentorship to acquire this knowledge.
Define the most effective learning path for you (Focus on chunking and sequencing of information for learning purposes).
COMMIT! When you start something make sure you finish.
Perform a post-mortem on not just the results of your work but also your learning process.
“Have patience, all things are difficult before they become easy” - Saadi
Pandoras Box
When you begin analysing other professional careers, you may get overwhelmed and think that you need to learn all this stuff before you can get started, this is not true. As a junior, you need to cover the fundamental skills used daily at a high level, so you are a productive asset for an employer. As a junior once on the job you will learn and develop many new skills which you will further develop and tune in your own time, these skills and the confidence you build as you gain more experience will help you grow into the role.
Don’t Wait For Perfection
Once you know you are capable of delivering work promptly that you are proud of it is time to make the jump. You don’t want to try and reach perfection before transitioning, perfection doesn’t exist and is continually moving, what you thought was good will be something you laugh to yourself about later on.
There’ll never be a perfect time! You need to go out on a limb to get the fruit!
“Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is!” - Mark Twain