How Does A Master's Make You More Employable?

[00:00:03] Speaker 1: Hello. I am Benjamin Culff. I am 23 years old and I am a level designer at a company called Lab 42. At undergrad, I did game design and production and then for post-graduate studies, video game, enterprise production and design. The undergraduate course I studied put me in a great position to as a wider view of knowledge about videogames in general. And I felt like I had a really honed in on a specific area that would land me a job. People can't be too general when looking for jobs in the video game industry because we all specialise in specific things and there's a specific job that we all need to be doing. So I felt like if I did a postgraduate degree, I'd have a chance to really find where I wanted to go in terms of exactly which job I wanted. So in the end that was my main choice. It put me in a great position to hone in on this specific area, which was level design. Eventually, I got the chance to do a couple of projects that allowed me to really fully focus on being a level designer, what it took to be a designer and how it all worked. So it put me in a great position where I was working with teams in my specific role that I wanted to be in the future. So when it came to getting the job as well, accustomed to fitting my role, but also how does my role fit into other people's roles at the same time? My postgraduate degree allowed me to get into my role, mainly because I was allowed to specialise in the area that I wanted to go down. I was really able to focus because of the projects on level design and what level design allowed other people to do as well on my project team. So how that role fit in the sort of development process was my main thing that I learned so that when it did come to getting the graduate role at my job, I was already well accustomed to what I needed to do for the team rather than being too broad that nobody knew what to do with me. And I didn't really know what to do with the people. So put me in a great position to be prepared for the expectation of what there is to be a level designer. My full time at BCU allowed me to explore a lot of areas of design and production over the course of this focus on both. At the time, BCU really allowed me to just explore the many different areas that you didn't know before. Like there is no more games design level design, technical design. So it really allowed me to spread out, have a feel of all the different areas and then find out what I enjoyed the most, which was level design, because that way eventually became more of a visual role, being able to move objects in an engine rather than documentation, which you can find in the other two areas of design and production. So it really gives the people a good taste of what they can expect from multiple areas, and then eventually they'll find what they enjoy the most. Sitting a post graduate really love me a chance to get skills on team building what it takes to be a team player. People do underestimate how much of a team player you need to be and how good your communication skills need to be because especially as a designer, when you're explaining so many different aspects to people that maybe you can't use a visual reference for, you need to be able to talk and to people and properly understand how to get that information across them. So just communication, confidence and team building. Really during my postgraduate degree, I was allowed to finish the course on a placement at my now current company, Lab 42. So getting that placement experience was priceless in terms of getting a job at the end. I definitely felt a lot more confidence after my postgraduate degree was finished compared to undergraduate, There was a lot more experienced people on my postgraduate course from all different types of backgrounds in terms of that careers and older people, younger people as well. So definitely gave me an aspect of this is the type of people that I'm going to be working with, people from all different backgrounds, genders and genres and careers as well. So it really put in perspective what I was going to be expecting in the actual job. Definitely find the area that you want to focus on if you are considering a postgraduate degree. Previous courses or previous experience giving you a broad example of what can be done in the industry and what you found the area just like to focus on entirely. Make sure that you are prepared to double down on that and really focus on that on your postgraduate degree. Because when you get to looking for industry jobs, they're going to want a very specialised person and if you can be that specialised person, then you're really going to put yourself ahead of the people that have gone for quite broad jobs. [00:00:03][0.0]