Question - How do you get Experience?

[GeorgeTuk]

Never said that.

This discussion isn't just about qualifications over experience. I responded to Blitzen the great authority on all industries's comment that he values experience 100 times more than qualifications.
I have only stated that I would take someone with a degree and 2 years over someone with no quals and 10 years

I'll take that as a pop at me, since it pretty obviously is.
How do you know I'm not talking about the same people you are?
Secondly, how do you know I dont take advice from other engineers?
If you think I'm not progressing aswell then I suggest you think again.
This month I got a bonus for my work last year. Just shy of £5000. I'll likely get at least that much again at Xmas.
I guess someone that actually has some money, rather than some person that refers to himself as a stealth geek on a forum seems to appreciate what I am capable of.
Of course a load of people seem to have picked up on the 90% coment and its not that surprising really. It is an exaggeration made to make a point and when I said IT I meant IT support. Ill revise the 90% figure to a more realistic one. Its more like 50% in IT support.

Don't bore me with how much you earn. I have desperatley wanted to get rid of staff in the past for having a bad attitude to work but these days you just can't do it.

Anyway if money is all you care about you can find yourself in my original characterisation. Of course I don't know you and you're a perfectly nice guy I am sure, but its just the way you have come across.

Anyway differences aside lets just try and help this guy out. Just don't tell him about the little blue bar, universally hated in the industry!

[arbitor]

I am going to wait till summer until i branch out and start looking unless i get a nice payrise

but i dont want to be in a call center, is there any usefull qualifications i can get that would aid me?

apart from a degree lol.

[TheAnimus]

Wonder why the investment bank i work for pays me (with no degree) ****eloads more than the wet behind the ears grads they have.

In a word - Experience.

A piece of paper and words after your name means nothing compared to solid experience.

Wounder why the investment bank i work for pays me (with a 2-1 from a medicore redbrick) less than people who've been in the industry for 10 years?

Because i'm 21.

But now as i'm about too go 22. I've nion double my basic, with 9 months of experiance. Now the contracter who sits behind me all of a sudden dosen't earn 8 times my salary.

You can have all the experiance you want, but people with a degree on average will earn more... Fact.

And when your < 25, enless you've got someone very impressive on your CV, in an impressive roll (ie, not middle/back office) your going too really find it a lot harder.

I was chatting to a mate who works at barcap, and he was saying its "shocking" how desperate they are too employ good IT grads... What was it that shocked us? They are employing people with 2-2s.

[mcmiller]

Wounder why the investment bank i work for pays me (with a 2-1 from a medicore redbrick) less than people who've been in the industry for 10 years?

Because i'm 21.

But now as i'm about too go 22. I've nion double my basic, with 9 months of experiance. Now the contracter who sits behind me all of a sudden dosen't earn 8 times my salary.

You can have all the experiance you want, but people with a degree on average will earn more... Fact.

And when your < 25, enless you've got someone very impressive on your CV, in an impressive roll (ie, not middle/back office) your going too really find it a lot harder.

I was chatting to a mate who works at barcap, and he was saying its "shocking" how desperate they are too employ good IT grads... What was it that shocked us? They are employing people with 2-2s.

oh la dee ba you must be so intelligent because you have a 2:1 pat yourself on the back you must be well on your way to MIT

This thread and this post by animus has really shown why university students have problems getting jobs

[Lee H]

University students have problems getting jobs

Yes. I've seen prime examples of this with a few friends I know.

1 of them has just do a forensics degree and even though he got a good grade and passed he's still looking for work as nobody will employ him. This is down to the fact that he has had a few part-time jobs but soon left them after a few weeks.

I must have been one of the lucky ones as I funded myself through college and university by working for a local business before that closed and then for M&S for a few years. Thankfully I've always had a part-time job since I was 15 and this has assisted me more in getting positions than the qualifications alone.

[arbitor]

fair play lee good to know that.

[TheAnimus]

oh la dee ba you must be so intelligent because you have a 2:1 pat yourself on the back you must be well on your way to MIT

This thread and this post by animus has really shown why university students have problems getting jobs

You see mcmiller, i think your getting the wrong end of the stick here.

Where i work, that is bottom of the barrel, very much so.

a (actually nice) guy with two PHDs from christs (a better than average cambridge college) rips on me endlessly for my poor academic achivement (i did have lots of fun thou ). I call him bauldie, karma in action!

How am i showing the problem university students have getting jobs?

In fact how you could think i was been remotely "get me" for a 2-1 (something i am ashamed off, as i very narrowly missed a first, thanks too slacking far too much in the 2nd year). What's your level of academic achivement?

[JPreston]

...
You can have all the experiance you want, but people with a degree on average will earn more... Fact.

...

Certainly true, though I forget exactly what the percentage difference is it's huuuuuge. Graduates on average are also much more secure in their jobs, before anyone says "oh well so they are more expensive and more likely to be made redundant" - that's rubbish.

Apparently though; a male graduate with a BA earns on average 4% less p.a. than a male of the same age with no degree at all!

[Butcher]

Thats why I'm lucky that my lecturers are getting some recognition into the industry and the games industry is fairly healthy around Newcastle (I often chat to the guy who did the design work for Prey on the 360 at work, the guy knows my lecturers (the place took on a couple of students IIRC) and the company is about 25 mins from my house)

Also we are encouraged to try and build up a portfolio of stuff we have done to get some experience, unfortunately, with uni there are a lot of exams etc. so I am majorly neglecting mine ATM

I'm quite fortunate in the respect to having social skills that I have worked in places where people skills are needed (teamwork and working with customers) for 3 years then

Games is a tough nut to crack TBH. I work in games and as we're recruiting atm I've looked at a lot of CVs recently.

Frankly, it's hard to distingush one grad or minimally experienced applicant from another by their CV. Anything that's not games experience tends to get largely ignored, though large gaps in employment/education history are a big warning sign. Having a degree makes little difference to quality of candidate in my experience. We've interviewed (and even hired) grads who have a decent degree and they have absolutely no clue whatsoever. I dunno if it's particular universities or what, but that sort of experience really sours people towards degrees as qualifications.

I think the best thing to get you an interview and potentially a job in games is to have a decent demo to show your skills off. It doesn't have to be anything amazing, but it should show that you can at least program and have some understanding of how games work. If it's all your own work that's a big plus point also (rather than being a uni project where you're given a skeleton and told to fill in the blanks).

[finlay666]

I think the best thing to get you an interview and potentially a job in games is to have a decent demo to show your skills off. It doesn't have to be anything amazing, but it should show that you can at least program and have some understanding of how games work. If it's all your own work that's a big plus point also (rather than being a uni project where you're given a skeleton and told to fill in the blanks).

Which is why we have a portfolio, a lot of the stuff we have been given is either an idea and just being told to do it (such as basic DOS based games), and a text based RPG (which I have neglected due to serious time constraints currently), or we have been given an engine and told to utilise it to make a game (such as the (very slightly) guided space invaders game, or the 'toy' which I am currently working on (a piano to utilise the direct x sound engine)

Also working on a game proposal document and a game deisgn document based on actual industry standard (we have been given the one for big mutha truckers 2 for reference) documents at the minute (which I hope to add to my portfolio to show my creative side)

[TheAnimus]

too summerise for rouge's sake i think its worth saying.

There are some jobs that will demand experiance...
ie we want 3 years pertitnant industry experiance.

There are jobs that say, we will take people with no experiance if they have a degree.

There are jobs that will take people with no experiance if they have a-levels, or gcses or what ever.

The ones that will pay best in the long run are those that just simply want a degree no experiance. They are also the most abundant.

Many firms prefer people with no industry experiance for their grads schemes because they get too mould them into their perfect vision of an employee.

Its worth noting outside intrests can also help, the imagine cup (as i said before) got me my job, and counted more than a couple of years of grunt programming would off (because my team was been compared with other graduates, and our running up instantly put me in a good top %, there are plenty of people with experiance who are useless, anything that can quantisize it, makes it easyer).

So stick out your degree, don't worry if your not doing a placement, there are no shortage of jobs at present. If you've got spare time, consider doing something like IT4C giving your time too needy charities and the like, morally rewarding as well as CV building.

Also there are bound too be things at your uni such as aim higher, which as well as giving you a warm fuzzy fealing, will give you an outside form of experiance which will help show your good.

[Butcher]

There certainly do seem to be jobs to spare as it were. We're having real difficulty finding competent programmers at the moment, eveyone seems to already have a job. :/

[Blitzen]

.

[chrestomanci]

Depending on how good your PERL is, write a tool which extracts all the ads from all the agencies on jobserve. I did it when I left IBM, it's very easy to spam all the agencies, and you will get literally 00s of call backs.

Most of them are used car salesmen types, who will try and put you forward for anything, but any port in a storm :-)

I don't think you need to that. Just upload a CV to the on-line jobsites like monster and www.jobsite.co.uk, and all the agencies (who like the look of your CV) will phone you.

They do automatic searches of the CVs on those sites, so remember to put in lots of buzzwords and acronyms, so it hits their filters. I dare say you could fool their system by writing in stuff like "I hope to qualify for an MSCE". The other tip is that they look for new CVs, so it is a good idea to upload a new one (even if it is only a tiny bit different) every couple of weeks.

[badass]

Are you real?
YOU have no idea what i do, where i work or what im qualified for.

The reason I posted that is to get that exact response.
Do you not see the irony of making a load of (incorrect) assumptions about me based purely on my posts on 1 thread, and then complaining that I do exactily the same thing?

You are VERY fast to mention your bonuses aswell and 'how great' you are at your job.
I dont know why as they are incredibly low for someone with as much 'experience' as you say you have. You were kept as you were 'cheap'!
Good software/IT guys/gals earn &#163;3K+ per month

There is no point arguing with someone that can fabricate the answers like you.

I cant be arsed with this as its obvious to anyone reading this from the start that you are full of ****.
You cant construct a proper argument, nor can you back up anything you say, and you accuse me of doing things you have done in the same thread.

[badass]

Don't bore me with how much you earn. I have desperatley wanted to get rid of staff in the past for having a bad attitude to work but these days you just can't do it.

I was doing that as earnings are an indicatior that someone knows what they are doing. In the same way experience is an indicator, and qualifications are an indicator.
The bonus was specifically mentioned to show that my employer thinks I am good. Nothing more

Anyway if money is all you care about you can find yourself in my original characterisation. Of course I don't know you and you're a perfectly nice guy I am sure, but its just the way you have come across.

The only reason I care about money is because it is required for me to get to where I want to be in life. That doesn't involve working for someone else.

Anyway differences aside lets just try and help this guy out. Just don't tell him about the little blue bar, universally hated in the industry!

Now there's a good idea!