by ·Comments Off on When Training is Not Training
FishVQ

This fish has been recently upskilled.

Last week I turned down an opportunity to do a government funded NVQ Business Administration training programme.  My reasons for this stretch beyond laziness and arrogance.

First of all, weighing in rather close to the arrogance side of things, I would feel sorry for the NVQ level 2 when it had to hang around with some of my other qualifications that are bigger and meaner and would pick on the poor thing.  However, this was not my only reason.  Any qualification is at least a qualification, it could look ok on a CV, and free training is after all free training.  Of course, in this case, it wasn’t really training.

I did sign up for the programme after seeing the list of modules that were available.  Some of them were ridiculous affairs like a module in “complying with health and safety” or “Being punctual:  Getting up that five minutes earlier”, but some of them looked quite useful, such as modules on the more advanced features of Microsoft Word or Excel, with which I sometimes find I have gaps in my knowledge.  However, the main reason for me deciding to abandon the venture was that I’d misunderstood what was meant by “optional units”.  What happens is that an assessor comes and follows you for a few days whilst you’re doing your job, works out what you do, and then signs you up for the modules most relevant for your work, or rather, signs you up for modules that you can not learn anything from as you do the content on a daily basis.  This to me sounds like a reversal of the basic premise of education.

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by ·Comments Off on Being Creative with Job Applications

I’m constantly fascinated by the paradox that sits at the heart of job hunting. We are encouraged to make our CV and covering letter stand out from the crowd and display unique qualities, but in the process make sure it looks the same as all the others and follows a certain convention. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as I’m alluding to, but regardless, there is a certain procedure that one follows for applying for new jobs.

Sometimes however, it appears that you just need to forget about everything you’ve been told and wing it a little.Image borrowed from Doublefine's website

Tim Schafer, the absolute hero of a game developer for many ordinary geeks such as myself has posted his application to the Lucasfilm games division on his website to celebrate his twenty years in the games development industry and it’s really worth a read, if only for the realisation that this actually worked.

Tim Schafer, for those who would know the work but not the name, was the mastermind behind Grim Fandango, an adventure game taking the afterlife equivalent of a travel agent on a sprawling journey through the land of the dead, Psychonauts, a platform game where you controlled a boy who ran away from the circus to attend a summer camp for psychics, and the upcoming Brutal Legend starring a roadie trapped in a heavy metal themed fantasy world. He is nothing short of an inspirational genius. Had he not taken an oddball approach to applying to Lucasfilm, the gaming world would have been a somewhat duller place.

What I find interesting is that he considers himself to have been massively under qualified for the job that he was offered.  This strikes a chord with me as I am constantly driven to a state of melancholy when job descriptions for things that I would love to do seem incredibly far away from my actual abilities.

I should really have learnt this lesson long ago when I applied for my current job and was informed by the job listing that I needed to be “fully literate in Microsoft Excel”. What that actually translated to was to know what the icon looked like.