Strengths & Weaknesses
For this task I will begin by identifying my main strengths and weaknesses to allow me to further develop my work process by altering how I produce my own work by noticing mistakes and certain weaknesses which could potentially set me back.
Strengths
I am currently a Level 3 Games Development student, I hope to move onto a 3D Games Art University course possibly University Of The Creative Arts in Farnborough as this course currently seems to be the best fit for me.
To begin analyzing my own strengths I will start with one which could potentially be in both strengths and weaknesses which I will further discuss in the weaknesses section. This being that I have quite bad anxiety which forces me to steer clear from spending crucial time I could be spending developing my work by socializing with people in the workplace thus rendering me able to produce high quality work within a relatively short time-frame. This also allows me to meet certain targets and deadlines possibly even before them which means if there are any mistakes this will save a lot of time allowing me to correct them accordingly.
Another strength I have is the ability to block out noise which could be quite distracting and affect the production of my work process, allowing me to concentrate and focus clearly on my work, usually by listening to music in headphones which could also be a weakness technically however It works for me.
Although my anxiety affects how often I socialize with others, I am still able to take part in group work due to many of last years tasks revolving around being in groups of 5’s and up. This was extremely beneficial for me as in the future I will most likely be working on group projects with far more than this amount of people and I am able to cope well with the anxiety of being around a lot of people.
I personally think I am a rather approachable person and I am rather helpful when others require help with certain aspects of their own work or if they’re generally having issues overall, I think this is a very good quality of mine as this means colleagues can be relatively comfortable around me during the first stages of meeting each-other which as a person with anxiety I am aware that many people have issues with this.
I am an extremely punctual student unless I am genuinely unwell leaving me unable to make it to college/work and even when I am sick I still manage to find the energy to use my laptop in bed to work on pieces of work that I can while I am able.
Due to my interest in the subject of this course in particular, I am extremely determined to succeed in this field of work meaning I am consistently working hard to produce high quality work even when tasks are extremely challenging with many obstacles in my way.
Even when I make mistakes in my own work I am able to honestly point the mistakes out as to not completely waste time of others and my own, I also learn from these mistakes and ensure that all of my work is complete to the best of my ability with fairly few mistakes and if there are any they will usually be something I was unaware of.
My biggest achievement overall is overcoming my agoraphobia and actually applying for the Level 2 Games Development course, this really opened up my life to many opportunities as I am able to leave the comfort of my own house and actually do something which makes me feel successful which is extremely fun at the same time, my second achievement was obtaining the highest grade when I finished the course which really improved my confidence meaning I had the Mental Capacity to enroll for the Level 3 Games development course to further improve my skill set.
Weaknesses
Whilst thinking about my weaknesses, I found that my main weakness is my Mental Health, this really takes a toll on me at points during projects and lowers my motivation to produce work especially if I’ve achieved poor grades during Interim’s or during Peer reviews as I feel like I’m not doing any good at all. I feel like this is something that will just improve over time as it has in the past 2 years being at Northbrook College.
A common occurrence is I’m quite poor at communicating with others in my class due to anxiety however I do try to improve on this a lot and have improved immensely over the past 2 years. Although I have improved I’m still struggling to manage to actually get to know my peers which can be difficult sometimes when I need help with some aspects of the course.
During projects I tend to get a lot of advice with how to improve on my work process such as increasing efficiency with geometry in my 3D models and sometimes this information doesn’t compute in my head and I forget what they have advised, also sometimes the advice doesn’t really make sense to me. This is another weakness I would really like to improve on during this year.
When taking criticism I take quite an offense and usually end up being rather defensive as I work really hard to produce what I do and feel like I’m being told that my work isn’t good. I know people don’t mean it like this and they are just trying to help me improve and therefor this is an extreme issue which I would like to eventually improve on in the future.
I usually find it hard to understand when people tell me I’m doing well with my work which makes me less motivated to continue to further develop on the work I’m doing, this also sends me into quite a panic rendering me quite useless in terms of written work so I end up not producing enough or good quality writing.
Tasks I usually avoid are ones which are heavily writing based such as this one I’m doing currently as I end up forgetting small parts of the work I needed to write, get extremely bored and forget to go back to the work and I also don’t really understand what to write about, especially when I’m talking about my personal strengths and weaknesses.
I personally think the roots of my failure are my Mental Health overall, Although my anxiety has improved greatly I still have quite bad depression which affects the way I manage my time and produce work. This also sometimes means that I’m not always present during classes and find it hard to talk to my tutors or peers about issues which in my head are extreme however once I eventually manage to talk about it they end up being much smaller than they appear. Over time I am hoping that this will improve in combination with the multiple medications that I am taking and personal goals which I have set myself and been working on during this year as I only noticed this last year.
Skills Audit
To further develop the skills I currently have, I need to first identify them all and discover what I need to do to take them to the next level so I can progress further through education/employment. This task is to list all of my skills and qualifications including my personal proficiency in each piece of software and design skills.
Education & training
Below is a ‘list’ of my past education and training, I haven’t included the grades I got for my GCSE exams as I only took Maths & English which I failed therefor are irrelevant. However I’m quite sure a level 2 qualification is an equivalent to 4 GCSE’s but I don’t think they include Maths & English which is quite important for the future, Although I failed these exams I can still manage to get into Universities under certain circumstances which apply to me.
Games development skills
Over the past 2 years I have developed an understanding of various software never used before and some which I have used a few times but never to a professional standard. I’ve listed these skills with an ability rating ranging from 1-4, 1 being no ability within the software, and 4 being proficient in the software overall. Seeing as my main preferable art style is 3D modelling, most of the software revolving around this I am fairly confident in using them such as Maya and Substance Painter however I put down Substance Painter as a 3 as I don’t think I’m using the software to it’s full potential.
Transferable skills
After filling in this form below I’ve come to the conclusion that my Verbal communication needs some serious work and I can improve on this throughout this next year hopefully through group projects, if these are not an option during this year then I will be producing side projects with peers to adapt further and increase my proficiency within this section especially in front of groups. I also need to work on leadership as I’ve never actually been a leader of any group projects or team building exercises in the past due to anxiety making me not wanting to be center of attention. All other sections I am fairly competent with apart from spreadsheets which I don’t think will be particularly useful in my line of work in the future.
Evaluation
During this task I have learnt a lot about myself that I really didn’t before as I had to think quite hard about things I’m good at, This taught me that I have extremely low confidence and I’d really like to start believing in myself which hopefully will improve over this next year. I’ve also informed myself of key weaknesses which I will be able to refer back to, to remind myself as I progress of how I can improve according to each weakness. After this task I plan to also write down advice for myself on a white board so I can constantly remind myself and keep myself motivated through the years and hopefully eventually I won’t need to do this. Overall this task was extremely difficult for me as I’m not particularly fond of writing in general, writing about myself in a positive and criticizing way made this somewhat incredibly worse than it was to begin with. In the future I need to work on my Verbal communication to advance further in the industry as a lot of jobs will require basic communication within a team to produce work, I could also potentially work on my leadership skills as I don’t have any experience within this section. Everything else listed with a rating 1-2 I don’t think personally need work on as I don’t need these particular skills to further progress in the future other than powerpoints or google slides to present ideas etc.
Personal Development Plan
Below is my personal development plan which I’ve created to set clear objectives for myself to achieve over the final year of Level 3. These include fairly basic things such as improving on my communication skills with other people within my group as well as others.
Some of the skills I would like to improve on before going to university is increasing my ability to minimize the geometry of my 3D artwork as within industry it’s a requirement to be able to create high poly and low poly assets which you can then bake onto each other to create the illusion of a high poly using the low poly asset.
I personally think that I will be able to achieve these in the time frames that I have set myself as I am constantly working harder to improve on my abilities.
James' 2nd Year - Level 3 