It's sometimes hard not to be a little bitter at 2014.
I worked really, *really* hard to get a job and little to nothing came out of it. My reasoning was that to be an attractive candidate, I couldn't rely on things like an art portfolio or an impressively engineered code base. As a designer/producer, the best evidence I had to showcase my abilities was a well-made, successful game. I reasoned that because it's difficult to spot good project managers based on their resume alone, I would pour everything I had into Cyber Heist, and point to the quality of the game when people asked what I contribute to a development team. I could point to Cyber Heist and say proudly, "I project managed/designed/produced THAT."
And in one sense, it paid off. Cyber Heist has been nominated for awards in 6 different video game competitions, won over $40,000 worth of prizes, and been featured in something like 20 news articles. I've personally interviewed for at least 8 of those that I can think of off the top of my head, and two of those times were articles entirely dedicated to an interview with me. My goal was to make Cyber Heist as impressive a project as possible, And I can safely call that mission accomplished.
As impressive as Cyber Heist is, however, it still has yet to land me a job offer, and for the life of me I can't figure out why. Maybe it's because when people hear "student project" they assume that it was all just homework. Maybe it's because people don't believe that my experience on a dev team was authentic, and I still don't know what it's like to work in a highly collaborative environment. Maybe it's because people assume that I've never really been under pressure to deliver a quality product with "real world" deadlines.
Whatever the reason, nobody seems to believe I have the skills and experience that I do, or I'd have been hired a long time ago.
I've been trying to fight that through most of 2014, and I'm happy to announce that my biggest attempt to strike against that misperception just launched last month: my website. My hope is that my website will help to explain what my role is on a team, what I've done with that role in the past, and why I actually have the skills I claim to have.
In truth, any kind of project management is a weird thing to get a degree in. Companies always seem to want people who have been trained in project management, yet (in my experience) rarely seem to go for the person actually trained and instead favor of the person only touting experience. Somehow, having simply been a PM in the past wins out over specifically being trained to be a PM, and my actual experience with being a PM in graduate school doesn't seem to count because I did it during my training. It's pretty exasperating, and it's why I dedicate a lot of my website to explaining what the EAE program does and why people should consider it good, solid experience.
So here's hoping that 2015 brings better fortune for my career than 2014 did.
