“Be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.”
I am giving a talk at the NYVR Meetup in which I’ll be talking about how to maximize your chances to get a job in the VR industry. Since it’s pretty much a brand new industry, hardly anyone has experience. This means that you can maximize your chances by doing some ground work now.
Here are the basic tenets;
- Hang out with people who are already doing what you want to do.
These folks are your intellectual stimulation. They know stuff, take the opportunity to learn from them. Informal groups, meetups, conferences, hackathons, or your own team are all ways to hang with similarly minded folks.
- Educate yourself on the topic. Become the expert.
Never turn down an opportunity to learn stuff. Find out the answers to questions. Force yourself to learn, ideally by building a real demo.
- Commit to working on a project. And finish it.
Ideally as part of a group.
The tools you should be using (learning) are;
Unity (C#), Unreal (C++), Maya, Max, Photoshop, VideoStitch.
And the demo should be running on:
Oculus, Vive, GearVR, Cardboard, stereo/360 video rigs
- Share your results
Publish your results. Blog, Webpage, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Don’t forget to show your passion when you are talking about what you’ve done. If your passion fails to show through, you won’t be a convincing hire.
“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
Hardly anybody in VR has multi-year on-the-job experience – so what we look for is self driven folks who’ve gone the extra mile to gain experience on their own time.
I talked about two videos folks should watch.