Week 19

The main question for today is; who is more employable – The art graduate with no experience in main computer programs such as Max and Photoshop or the University Graduate who knows everything.

However it isn’t really as easy when it comes to that as it boils down to the company and to the individual.

The Art Graduate: Having a blank canvas to work with and train up could give the employer to monitor how the employee is learning, in doing this the employee is taught that companies way of doing things. However training is expensive and takes time and the game industry is a fast paced industry, so not many companies are going to be able to spend enough time needed to teach properly. However it could be a good investment training them up except when they decide that they don’t really like the games industry and move on to work in film in something. Bottom line is I guess having a nice clean artistic person to work up with who doesn’t have somebody else's way of thinking embedded into them is all nice and good, however companies simply don’t have the time to train to a great standard. The bonus for having an art graduate is that their open minded, creative and enthusiastic however won’t have the technical side to back it up.

The University Graduate: Having gone to University and trained up with Max/Maya and Photoshop this person is going to have knowledge about modeling, texturing and animating. This person can dive straight into the industry and not need to have extensive training at the company’s expense. However since this person has been trained up in University, the techniques that he/she knows will be influenced and affected by the Tutor’s knowledge, which is fine if the Tutor knows his stuff however if the Tutor has poor skills this might have an impact upon the student thus churning out a poor employee. Since artistic skill wasn’t particularly involved when learning Max/Maya the student might not have any knowledge on colour theory or anatomy, the fact that he/she can model a human in Max/Maya is employable however modeling a human with incorrect proportions, isn’t.

The Verdict: I think it’s pretty obvious what the answer is. Having two students relying on one side of games design will result in a poor result. Creating and understanding games includes areas such as Art, Technical knowledge, Social knowledge, psychiatry and architecture. When I look at it like that then I know that our course has got the balance working in their favour since everything we learn in both our lessons with Joel and our lessons with Chris bounce off each other quite effectively, the knowledge learnt in one class can be applied to the other. I believe that this is what employers are looking for, a knowledge of both Artistic and technical and skill in both areas.