Life changing or career building

They say that there are things in this world that you can’t teach someone. But often these skills are something that you can learn yourself. One question that’s often asked is whether people should be taught ‘soft’ skills – a little hard to explain, they could be said to be transferable to as many situations as possible and are a greater benefit to technical skills than the other way around in the long run, or whether people should be taught technical skills that are specific to the job at hand and tied to the technology currently in use. Though speculations can be made there’s no real telling where industry will go in the future in terms of needed skills and some companies claim to prefer individuals with liberal arts backgrounds whilst others prefer graduate artists and programmers. Of course this preference is as much dictated by the company’s style and work ethic as it is about anything else and it’s not about whether one company or the other is right.

Arguments have been made that with the game industry moving as fast as it is, technical skills may be obsolete as fast as they can be taught and that learning on the job is one of the only ways to ensure that employees have the most relevant skills. Of course learning on the job is essential I do not believe that the teaching of specific technical skills should ever be overlooked.  Whilst it’s true that the industry is moving fast, the skills that we learn are hardly obsolete; though the technology may change the skills aren’t immediately useless; though the technology may grow often the skills required to operate it don’t change, or rather they change at a much slower rate than people would have you believe – Photoshop has had several updated versions since I started to use it in secondary school but the skills I use to operate it have stayed the same all this time.

I myself started out in a Fine art background. I didn’t know what industry I wanted to work in and I was only sure that I wanted it to contain my skills as an artist. In the end I’ve studied eight years of fine art, two of Graphic design and done courses in textiles, photography, metalwork and sculpture amongst others. These skills are transferable to any creative industry; I’ve learnt how to paint, sculpt, design and draw. Not to mention less ‘practical’ skills like how to organise work, reference, iterate and other key skills that I’ve used often in later years and they’ve formed the basis for my more specialized education as part of the game art and design course. Now personally I believe that one set of skills without the other means that you’re working harder to build one up – At the start of the first year my inexperience with the 3D modelling programs we used meant that I felt like I was constantly playing catch-up with my more experienced peers and it was a major source of stress.