Do you need certifications and degrees as a game developer?

hey what's up jason here today i want to talk about game development and certifications degrees and certificates but before we get started i want to ask you a quick favor i really want to know what everybody's thinking before i kind of poison their minds with my own opinions and my own experiences so if you've got any thoughts on this you know you think certificates are great they're terrible degrees are great they're terrible maybe you've had some experience around one of them or multiple please let me know down in the comments i'd like to see kind of how those views are at the beginning of the video and then see if maybe any of the minds get changed or if maybe my mind gets changed after reading a bunch of the comments i don't know how likely that is though because i've got to admit that i've got a little bit of a bias here and part of that comes from the fact that the idea to do this video came while i was working on the unity certification working on the exam and getting ready for that i thought hey i wonder what everybody else is thinking about certifications because i know what i used to think about certifications when i was quite a bit younger and doing a lot of hiring and i know how i feel about them now and same with degrees and certificates so i was kind of really curious what everybody else thought decided hey let's do a video share my opinions my ideas and kind of get the conversation started before we dive into the more controversial topic or the one that people like to fight about all the time which is degrees or degrees and versus certifications let's quickly just talk about certificates and certifications and what the difference is because sometimes people mix these up and don't realize that there's actually a relatively significant difference so most of the time when you're looking at a certificate a certificate is showing that you've completed something or finished some tasks some course some set of tests or some repeatable usually redoable test type thing something that certifies that you've finished the task then you're able to at least accomplish whatever the thing was it's not a full-on test it's the kind of thing that i give in my courses to show that you've completed the course and that you've passed the tests you may have cheated there's no way for me to know for sure that you didn't just go through and cheat or you may have had to take the test a hundred times there's no way to verify that you didn't just retake it or anything nothing to show that but it does show that you've at least completed it and a certificate is i'd say kind of at the low end of things a lot of the time it's what a company requires for some continued learning so if you're looking at continued learning or want to take some courses my courses have certificates so go ahead and check them out but it's not the kind of thing that people usually are looking for when they're hiring for a job usually that's something a little bit bigger like one of these certifications and certifications are nowhere near as i'd say easy to deal with or easy to get as a certificate because it doesn't just say that you've completed a thing it's certain certification is really meant to say that you know and understand a thing and the way that that's done is usually by monitoring a test and having a really well done test that's really balanced and verified and validated by industry professionals and vetted against a bunch of other people that are taking the tests when you do things like these unity certification tests it's a bunch of experts working on the questions building out the tests and then they have an entire professional cycle around validating all of the questions and making sure that the test actually verifies that you know the person passing this test can do whatever the job is that's kind of in the description and that's what a certification is kind of meant to do but when i grew up certifications were i would say maybe they weren't all different but the ones that i was seeing were not very useful at least and i want to just talk about that a little bit so my first experience with certifications was meeting a bunch of people while i was in high school and just starting college who had a plus certifications and if you know what an a plus certification is hit the thumbs up button i guess and drop a comment let me know about it but um a plus certification was essentially a certification that you understood the basics of a computer taking it apart putting stuff together there's a little bit of other stuff but it was essentially like working on the fundamentals of a computer being able to work like in a computer repair shop or something like that would say it's about where it would test or qualify you except i knew so many people who had these a plus certifications that had no idea how to do any of the stuff that it was actually on the certification and i don't know if it was um well maybe they knew the basics of what was on the certification because i don't even remember what was on there but they certainly couldn't debug diagnose or fix any computer problems so what i my experience at that time was just that i would meet people constantly with these certifications that could not do the job and then i would meet a lot of people without certifications that could do it just fine now again that was a long time ago i mean we're literally talking like 20 some years ago so it was quite a bit quite a while ago and i never really dove back into certifications after that i kind of just wrote them off for the most part up until a couple years ago when i got the opportunity to work on some more certifications and i saw what the actual process was like on some of these new ones or probably a lot of the new ones and probably the majority of i don't really know because i haven't done a whole lot of other certifications or worked on a lot of other certifications so i don't know if they're all as good as what i'm seeing with the unity specific ones but i think that it's certainly opened my eyes and made me think hey maybe they're not also all as bad as that first um a plus and the the situations that i was running into back in the old days and i got to remember to just kind of you know re-evaluate things and see you know if there's some something has completely changed so let's talk about the value now of certifications and degrees because none of this matters to just like getting a certification or a degree unless you're actually using it to get a job or using it to advance something either well you're using it i guess there are two reasons you could use it to verify and validate your knowledge and look for gaps that's definitely one reason to take a certification or a degree program do you want to go through see what it is that you don't know already and then learn those things if you fail something on a certification or you you know go through a class in a degree program that's teaching you something new maybe learn about stuff you don't know and hopefully improving your game development skills but the bigger reason and the primary reason that people are getting a degree or certification is of course just to get a job they want to either switch into a different industry advance in the industry that they're in or some places to literally just give you a pay raise if you get a degree i remember qualcomm was like that you get a degree bam instant automatic raise one of the big questions that comes from all of this is which one of these should you get if you want to be a game developer should you get the degree should you get the certification should you just get the certificate i would say the certification or the degree are definitely good but which one's better i really was kind of up in the air on this so i wanted to start by just putting out a poll i put it on the community page and the results came back completely split which was kind of interesting five percent cared about a degree five percent cared about a certificate but the more surprising part was that the either is good option really came in ahead and people just kind of felt like whether you had a degree or a certification either one showed that you were into it and seemed to be able to probably do the job and i tend to agree with that i think that if you've got a game development degree it shows that you're into game development you've been spending time and energy on it and if you have one of these actual certifications where people have tested you and watched to make sure that you understand and know things then i think that it does really show that you've spent the time to learn what was important and what was really required to do the job in the industry so for me i guess just the whole experience of working on certifications has really changed my mind but there was one other thing that i'd say kind of pushes me over the edge and that was a lot of my experience with past managers in the past i've worked with a lot of people who were maybe not specifically unity developers but developers on other engineering fields or just managers who are running companies and stuff and when they're looking at interviews or people to interviewing going through the resumes one of the things that really stood out for me was how much they pushed forward and valued those certifications i think part of it is probably just some industry bleed from other industries and certifications being extremely valuable in other industries and those people having some exposure and um yeah really just exposure to those industries so kind of having pushing that value over there but part of it is just i think really there that they've seen that sometimes certifications actually do make a big difference and matter so it's again changed my mind quite a bit if you'd asked me a couple years ago i would have said certifications probably don't matter at all but now i would say hey get a certification if you can um and the costs are sometimes an issue but if you can afford it or you get into a program that um that gives you a certification opportunity for free definitely take that opportunity now i also just want to be clear like don't think that getting a certification is going to just get you a job so if you're like struggling having a hard time paying bills and things don't spend your last couple dollars on a certification thinking that that's going to push it over the edge or anything it's certainly not it's nice to have thing if it's something that's something you can get and you're comparing or considering between the two certifications probably a lot cheaper and a lot easier than a degree but also requires you to do all of the learning on your own so i guess i i've got a lot of thoughts on it i've hopefully shared kind of my brief ideas and i don't know i i hope this was at least a little bit helpful clarifying the just the thought of degrees and certifications certificates and and all of that and i'm also really curious to see if anybody's mind changed along the way throughout this video if so please just drop a comment and let me know and if you think i'm completely crazy and way off too drop a comment about that too and let me know because again i feel like i might just be completely biased but um yeah that's all i've got to say all right i'm gonna stare outside and watch the garbage truck go by see y'all later don't forget to hit the like and subscribe bye

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 10,699

Keywords: unity3d, unity, certification, degree, cs degree, college, game development, game dev, programming, game programming, unity certification, how to make games, coding, software development, gamedev, unity certificationunity certification

Id: QIlbkWlUsZ8

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021