Not so Unhelpful Suggestions (Advancing Career)

For this chapter we went over different tactics and techniques on advancing your career. In this chapter the author goes over three unhelpful suggestions in advancing your career: follow your passion, develop your skills, and grow your network. I think this is pretty terrible advice, especially for me since this is where a lot of my drive comes from. In my journey towards being a game developer I follow these three things extensively, and I have had a good amount of success so far. Because of this, I will be focusing on why I feel that his advice on not doing these things is wrong for me. I’m going to focus on the first two follow your passion and develop your skills, from a Game Developers perspective.

1. FOLLOW YOUR PASSION

So I chose this video( link to part two is here) because it really breaks down how hard it will be to develop a game, they don’t sugar coat it. This is relevant because I feel that’s it is good to follow your passion but to also have a realistic mindset about your career. So when I researched this I found that there were more places saying to no follow your passion, then there were those saying you should. Okay I must admit that you should not follow this advice without any practical insight. If you just follow your passion without having any plans then your career will flop sooner then later. What a lot of people are failing to realize though is that passion plays a major part in your career. For me I chose what I’m doing now because I have a huge passion for games, and I am willing to take the steps to make a career out of it. Passion though can be a bad thing when you blindly follow your passions and are rather impulsive about your decisions. It is good to have passion, but make sure that it is intentional and well thought out. Make a plan as to how you’re going to use your passion to make a career that you can support yourself off of. At the end of the day its better to be passionate about your career then just seeing it as a means to make ends meat. This way you will enjoy and feel good about what you are doing, as opposed to dreading going to work every morning.

2. DEVELOP YOUR SKILLS

I feel that this is advice that should be followed It is always good to continue to develop your skills and improve yourself. For Game developers you have to know scripting, model design, environmental design, audio, storyboarding, etc. With so many skills to learn it is pretty easy to get overwhelmed. Here are some resources that I use to help me strengthen my skills and develop new ones. I love the Extra Credit YouTube channel because they put things into perspective and give good advice from start to finish (Extra Credit- Game Design Playlist). It is very important to continue to develop your skills. Whether you learn by going out there and doing it, Reading books on the subjects, or even watching tutorials always continue to improve your skills. When I’m working on the Unity (Game Engine) I love to follow their tutorials they made to help for nearly all aspects of the engine(Unity Tutorials Link). Something that’s important to remember is especially with your career you cant get caught up in trying to learn a multitude of different skills. This will bog you down. Just pick a couple and really hone your skills in them before moving on. If you know your talented in a certain area though then I would definitely build up that area as much as you can so you have a skill your truly exceptional in.
This ends my thought on Chapter 3.