Learning is obviously an important topic on this site and while there are many methods to learn, one that is often thought of only in business is delegation. I think delegation has a lot of negative associations in the workplace because people see it not as a learning tool, but as a way to pass the buck. A way for a boss to unload their work on you. I hope to change that impression and look at why delegation is an amazing learning tool!

Learning with Delegation

Delegation is when you engage others to take on responsibility or actions that you would have done otherwise. Those actions are often things others could easily do. Sometimes they need a little guidance or perhaps a lot more than that before being comfortable with doing it themselves. Whatever the circumstance is, there is room for someone to learn some new skills and for the person delegating to learn from teaching. That process may take minutes, it might take months, it just depends on what and who is involved, but there is always some room to learn for both parties.

I’m not going to go into details with each step on how to delegate (at least not today) but the process looks basically like this:

1. Identify something that someone else could do that you currently do yourself
2. Pick someone who is able to take on that new delegation
3. Discuss and make clear that you need that persons help and give them the reasons you picked them
4. Describe what you would like them to do and what the benefits are (personally, for the organization, etc)
5. Have them paraphrase and repeat in there own words to ensure they understand
6. Brainstorm any resources or training needed and who can provide that
7. Plan some actions to get started
8. Agree on how to report back on the delegation

This whole process can be simple and open the door to teach something you are already competent at, and to have someone else learn from you. If you are not in a position to delegate you can definitely ask your boss or even other colleagues if there is something they could delegate to you to help take it off their plate. There is almost ALWAYS something they would love you to do and its a great learning opportunity. Swamped with work already? Ask your boss if there is something they can delegate to you and discuss what YOU can delegate to someone else to free some time.

Delegation is useful as a learning tool between peers as well and if you find someone interested in learning the same way, you can often swap delegation with each other to each practice and to learn something new.

Get Out of Your Own Way!

How many times have you said or heard that people don’t delegate because they don’t have time! This is ridiculous as delegation is the ultimate time saver. Its also the ultimate tool to learning new things in a couple of ways. Most of the time, you are doing what you already know how to do. Those are the tasks you learn the least from and while you may be good at them, if that’s all you do, you can’t spend much time learning. To keep learning and have time for learning, you need to stop doing the things you are already good at and make time for learning new things. Delegation is perfect for this to free up your own time to help you master your skills by teaching them to someone else. I relate this highly to getting out of your comfort zone and taking on new things, all of which are learning opportunities. Look for these chances to delegate, stop doing ONLY the things you are already good at, and quit getting in your own way from learning!

Others Want You to Delegate to Them

I’ve written before about not being afraid to ask others for help and that is the best way to delegate something, by asking. People are afraid to delegate because they think it means telling someone else what to do. That is not delegation at all. The other persons needs to understand why you are asking them and have their own motivation to helping you. Perhaps they will learn something new, perhaps because they are better at doing it than you, perhaps they might advance in the company by taking on more responsibility, whatever the reasons, they need to be motivated and willing to take it on. If you ask, instead of tell you can get around that. You need to be willing to assist if its needed for anything you delegate as well.

Delegation Outside of Business

Delegation is really about accountability and so it’s useful outside of an authoritative position or business position as well. If you always look at asking for help and explaining why you’re asking and ensuring that person is motivated to help, delegation is just as effective outside of business. This might be with your friends, family or colleagues in a volunteer or non-profit organization, they all work the same way. The human component of delegation is the teaching, the responsibility and the accountability to each other. There needs to be a clear line of responsibility so that both parties know what each other will do and help with and that there is joint accountability to each do their own part in the process. The opportunity to learn from each other is just as likely whether its in business or not.

I’ll be expanding on this delegation process in a few days to help you put this into practice. If you haven’t yet subscribed to new content here on LearnThis.ca you can do so here in RSS and here by email .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 8 Comments »

I recently published a guest article on DamnGoodManager.com about doing performance reviews as a manager for your direct reports. I suspect I have a lot more readers here who are not managers but do need to prepare for their own performance reviews often. This post is about some tips on how to do that and also useful since its from a manager’s perspective (yours truly). I encourage you to read through both posts since you will see some points from the manager’s perspective that are looked for and can also then better prepare for your next performance review.

So, this article is about the things I highly recommend you do in your job to ensure you get great performance reviews, year after year! Unfortunately there is no quick answer or magic potion to brew up that will guarantee you a great review as every workplace is difference and some things simply depend on your manager. Even still, there are some specific things that if consistently practiced, will make a big difference to improve your reviews every year. Here they are:

Focus on your Main Objectives

Confirm these with your boss. Ask to meet and discuss them, so you can understand your job description and ask all the questions required so you will clearly understand what your priorities should be according to YOUR boss. If they are going to be evaluating you, you better know what they are expecting from you! If you have regular meetings or one-on-ones with your boss, that is the best time to ask and help understand these. If you don’t have one-on-ones or regular meetings with your boss, ask for some time to review this and ALSO ask to start meeting on a regular basis with your boss so you have a chance to discuss your performance and priorities and to get more regular feedback from them. Take the responsibility to make this happen if it is not already. You simply can’t afford NOT to and if you are not meeting with your boss, you cannot possible know exactly what they are expecting from you.

Make Commitments and Tell Your Boss

The only way to impress your boss and get a great review is to not only do what is expected, but to do AT LEAST what is expected. If you can make a commitment to go above and beyond that and then deliver on that, you will be highly regarded. Decide on some area that you are willing to work to excel at and tell your boss exactly what you intend to do. Delivering on something that YOU set out to do will impress. This is far more valuable than over-delivering on something asked of you. That initiative you show and desire to excel will be extremely helpful towards earning a great review.

Know Your Boss’ Job

If you know your boss’ job and can see areas that you are able to help with, you should do so. Any responsibilities you can take on that specifically free up time for your boss, is going to be the most valuable time you can spend at work, especially in their eyes. Offer to help every chance you get and ALWAYS be willing to take on new work asked of you. This may mean juggling other priorities, delegating your own tasks or simply eliminating low priority work. The things that fall through the cracks are often completely overlooked anyway.

Be Reliable and Consistent

Work consistent hours at your workplace as much as possible. Even if you have flex time, changing your hours often and having gaps in your availability even if its the same amount of hours, never looks as good to a boss so consistency is very useful. I recommend starting earlier than most as early rising statistically get more done and are more likely to complete their goals and achievements. Assume your boss knows this statistic as well, so starting early is a good thing. A side note when it comes to consistency; don’t EVER complain about or use traffic as an excuse for being late and try not to drastically changing your work schedule from day to day or week to week. Even if you change how you get to work from day to day, do what you can do on your own time, to adjust things so you arrive at the same time consistently. Don’t give the impression that you sacrifice your work time when you arrive later than usual because of personal travel arrangements.

Being consistent and reliably on time will build confidence in you as a loyal, dependable worker. This is important. Being consistent also means leaving at a consistent time. A lot of people feel that working late hours looks good but it doesn’t! Delivering results looks good, not how many hours it takes to do that. If you can leave consistently and still deliver, you show character and balance with your home life. Its great to be willing to work late when asked or when needed to get a deliverable completed, but a consistent worker who gets there job done well and on time is always better than someone who is having to put in extra time to deliver the same thing. Often people who work very extended hours are seen as people who waste much time during the day and so have to work late to catch up each day. This is not a good impression to give. A consistent schedule and work ethic shows dedication and trust in your ability.

When At Work, Work!

Keep all your personal activities away from your work. Don’t surf personal sites, personal email, social networking sites or any other "home" activity at the office / workplace. Oh, and turn your personal cell phone off or at least to silent mode. Personally, I recommend this even for breaks and at lunch as much as possible. Do some reading, online research (work related) or socializing and relationship building during down time at work, not personal stuff. This looks FAR more productive to your boss and peers and builds the confidence in your work ethic and productivity. Oh, and if you don’t think your boss notices the time you spend on facebook or checking the latest sports stats, you’re wrong! They do notice and it affects their impression of you.

You do Have to Talk to Your Boss

Talk to your boss regularly. Daily if at all possible. Keep him / her informed of any concerns (and indicate your reasons why), significant progress, and even setbacks or delays. If you are sharing news about a problem or setback, always provide some kind of plan to help resolve the problem and get things back on track.

You boss is looking for results, so keep this in mind when you share anything with them. Always offer some solution or suggestion for any problem and NEVER just dump the problem on them. Ask them to help YOU resolve it and make sure you offer to resolve it yourself with their suggestions or advice on how to proceed. This VERY often opens new opportunities that seem tough like new responsibilities but it is exactly these things that will impress your boss. Being willing to deliver bad news to a customer, dealing with a personal conflict with another person, or even approaching a peer about poor performance, will definitely impress your boss. NEVER expect them to deal with a problem you bring to their attention unless they say it is theirs to handle and don’t want you involved. Still offer, even if they first offer to take it on themselves.

These types of examples are great things to learn if you are not yet doing them and all helpful for you to deal with and not dump on your boss. The more chances you give your boss to see that you can handle things that they have to normally do themselves, the more impressed they will be.

Review Your Own Performance

Review your own performance regularly, work on your goals weekly and inform your boss in writing with a monthly status report. Don’t ask if you can send it to them or it they want it, just do it no matter what. They will read it and they will find it informative and helpful even if its just a summary of what they already know. That is unlikely, its much more likely a monthly status report is the best window into your job that your boss has and they will really appreciate it and the initiative you take by sending it to them every single month. Start them off by explaining to your boss that you do them as part of your weekly and monthly planning to ensure you are on track with your priorities and goals and that you also want to make sure that they (your boss) are well informed on your progress, what you are working on and what to expect of you.

You really should be evaluating your own performance in your career anyway since you are the only one responsible for it, not your boss or anyone else. I recently wrote another article specifically about taking control and manage your own career . So, schedule yourself time each week to work on your yearly goals and the activities from any previous performance reviews you want to reinforce and improve on. Put those details and others in a monthly status report. Other elements to include are:

• Project updates you are involved on or leading
• Completed deliverables this month
• Summary of new things that you have learned or studied that month (doesn’t have to be strictly work related)
• Progress and actions taken toward any goals set
• Review of any existing responsibilities with your job
• Any major hurdles in progress or that your surpassed
• Next Month Forecast: Your main one or two activities planned for the next month, what would you like to accomplish

All of this should fit on a single page of paper or so. It should be kept brief and to the point. Send it on the same day every month (by email is fine), keep the subject line consistent each month and include the date. You need to do this because your boss WILL come back to these when they prepare your performance review and it will make their job much easier if its all easy to find. That is yet another great reason to do this monthly. Other things it provides you is a plan for the month of what to focus on and to focus on results as well as a clear indication of what you are working on so that your boss has a chance to correct or change any priorities LONG before your next review. This ensures you work on the right stuff and your boss knows it every single month.

Posted by Mike King under Business | 2 Comments »

The title of this article saying this list is to “Fast Track” isn’t really true. This list is to provide tips and behaviors to follow that will make a significant difference in how you perceive others, in how they perceive you and will help to make you more successful in your career and other related life activities. That was way too long for a title however so I choose the one I did!

So this list is what I believe it takes to make quick progress which I’ve learned from my own experience and by learning from and studying others. I hope it gives some inspiration to be more productive with your own progress and is useful to remind you of the things to focus on and to learn more about if they are unfamiliar to you. My list is not exactly ordered, but I did put the items first that I believe more strongly in, that is not to say they are the most beneficial though.

1. Demonstrate and hold true to your values and beliefs.
   This doesn’t matter where you apply it, it can give you so much in how others perceive you. It allows you to live and work with content in your actions and to earn respect from others who learn and understand your motives. Sticking to your values no matter what shows great integrity and consistency, which can definitely help you make progress in your career and in the trust you build with every relationship.
2. Volunteer and take on new work.
   Givers are great! Volunteer yourself and expect nothing back. Take joy in what you have to offer others. Take advantage of a giving attitude in a workplace, it is generally valued and seen as a leadership skill. It demonstrates an attitude of seeking for new responsibilities and gives you an opportunity to really take on responsibility and prove yourself with your actions. Develop a habit of being quick to volunteer for tasks (but don’t expect to always get it) and be willing to take on work no one else wants.You learn so many new things by volunteering and can experience great joy seeing your contribution and impact you have simply by choosing to give more than you are expected or asked. And those meaningful and heartfelt “Thank You” notes and words of appreciation can really make your day (or week or month).
3. Set and focus on planned goals.
   I’ve written several articles already on goals which you can jump to them here for more details. Goals really are the key to accomplishing whatever you desire and so setting them and focusing on planned goals is a critical step to advanced things in your life and career. If you do nothing else from this list, at least start using goals effectively.
4. Take risks.
   Many people are afraid to take risks in life and they keep themselves in a safe environment wherever possible. Life doesn’t simply come handing things out to people and it takes some initiative and risk to make quick progress. Taking risks of course introduces an element of possible failure and those that understand the benefits of failure can learn from it instead of being afraid of it. Its fine to make mistakes as long as you can learn from them and better yourself because of it.
   Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. Albert EinsteinTwo specific ways to take risks are by challenging existing systems and processes you have experience with in order to improve it and to welcome change. Both of these have some element of risk and are often areas that you can improve things and make progress.
5. Communication Mastery
   What I mean by this is just to learn to master communication skills. Communication is such an important skill in so many areas its definitely worth learning more about it and learning to master it. A couple of short tips to improve by communication are:
   • Keep others informed of progress and problems when working together. Don’t try to own and hide anything. Honesty is the best practice.
   • Focus on your listening skills by practicing techniques that use reflective questions, paraphrasing and empathetic understanding.
   • Share / inspire your vision, values and passions to others.
6. Help Everyone
   People develop relationships quickly when you offer help. Helping others lets you share what you have learned with them and it often can enable others to take their own actions afterwards. A generous giving heart and attitude is a great personal attribute and generosity works in a recycling way.
7. Educate/Train constantly
   Continue to improve yourself and become more and more educated in the areas of your strengths so that you can be more effective with them. Learning to be an expert in areas can be done by self study and provides a valuable foundation to demonstrate knowledge and depth in an area of practice which will make you much more likely to succeed in that type of role. There are so many resources available nowadays to continually learn from, its easy for people with a learning attitude to keep learning more. It stimulates the brain and thought processes improving your reasoning, problem solving, communication foundation and your memory, among other things. I can’t stress this one enough.
8. Humility and Modesty
   Career progression often leads to a person having and showing pride in their accomplishments. This is dangerous and can be very negative towards others and easily come across as self admiration. This is why a humble and modest attitude is critical to making fast progress in life and your career. Humility balances you with others and keeps things at a level playing field without any distinction between your progress and that of others. Modesty is acting in a way that you don’t self advertise your accomplishments and that you give more credit to others than you take for yourself.
9. Compassion / Empathy for others
   Having compassion and empathy for others opens many doors of communication and builds trust in relationships. Truly understanding the needs of others and feeling some impact from those needs leads to many of the other areas on this list, but especially better communication and new avenues to help others.
10. Positive / Energetic Attitude.
    A positive attitude and energetic style is a very common leadership skill and it not only motivates others, but also drives a person internally. There is so much to say on this topic I can’t really even touch the surface. Keeping and controlling your mindset is a powerful tool in life and with a positive energy and passion in doing it, leads to great achievement. Consistency here and learning to reinforce your thoughts and displayed energies in a positive way can accelerate many areas of your life. This will continue to feed your desire so that you can easily get through difficult times and put in the focus needed to accomplish what you want, no matter what it takes.
11. Make Connections, Know and Like Everyone
    Relationships and connections to other people are one of best things in life, as well as a tool to make the progress you want. Connections provide you ways to find and give help, to share your stories, passions and feelings and open many doors that can continue to steer you on your path. If you are willing to see people as individuals without judging them you can focus on building meaningful relationships in your life. Give more to relationships than you ever expect in return. A fantastic book I’d recommend on this topic is Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi which I reviewed here.
12. Make the most of your working time
    My last tip to improving your productivity towards life and career progress is to make the most of the time you have. Eliminate the things you really don’t need to do and take the time to find your passions in life and focus your time and efforts on them. At work, make sure you are in fact working. Don’t use work time for anything personal, don’t surf the web for personal interests and minimize your personally discussions to breaks and after hour times. Ensure you are seen as a hard worker by your peers and colleagues and you will definitely make good progress in your career. Remember you don’t need to work more hours, just work those hours better. While this doesn’t provide success just on its own, it certainly helps when you focus on results and what is expected of you. Find ways to be more effective, not just efficient and use your work time for what you are paid to do, work!

This list only provides a starting point on each of the 12 items. I encourage you to look at which ones you currently focus on and how you could add the others into your routine. These are the things I’ve found by my experience and learning to make the most difference and I’m sure there are many others just as important. What additional items would you add to this list?

Posted by Mike King under Business & Life | 7 Comments »

A lot of people make up a world of reasons as to why they don’t have a career that they are happy with. It amazes me how often I hear excuses from people why they don’t have the perfect job and why they don’t have any control over their own jobs and career. This is just crazy! Everyone makes their own choices in life including those that build your career.

Stop Blaming Others

People love to push blame to others and this is so obvious with people when they talk about their careers. Have you ever heard some of these complaints?

1. I didn’t get that promotion because my boss doesn’t like me.
2. I don’t like my work, but hey, who does?
3. Everyone but me seems to get the lucky opportunities.
4. No one notices the good work I do, just the bad things, so I can’t get anywhere in my career.
5. I don’t have the time to work extra and make a great impression.

These are just a few examples. All of these are pointing the finger, where one should be accepting responsibility.

You Control Your Career

Now, am I suggesting that you should simply love your work and be happy in your career? No. Work is still work and most people have other things in life they would rather be doing. You should enjoy your work however and my only point here is that you have a lot more control over enjoying your work than you might think. If you don’t like your job, find a better own. If you are missing out on opportunities, it’s probably because your actions or work are the cause of that, you need to make your own opportunities. And its not your bosses job to make sure you get that raise or new position, its yours. You need to take ownership and manage your own career. Make those tough decisions to change things when they aren’t how you want them to be. Know what you want and act on it. Set some career goals and take action everyday to work towards those goals and make the most of them .

Get connected with the people you want to work with and learn about the businesses and jobs you do want. Stop wasting time at work, analyze and prioritize your day to only spend time on the things that will make a difference to you and your career. Focus on your own growth and don’t expect someone else to do it for you. Find a mentor to share ideas with and learn from them to help advance your career. Help others in their own quest to have a more fulfilling career and discuss how to do this with your colleagues. All these things contribute towards you successfully managing your career and it will bring more joy to your daily life at work with a strong sense of control that will energize you forward!

Posted by Mike King under Business | 2 Comments »

When it comes to getting jobs or interviews in business, its surprising how many people DON’T think about their online portfolio beforehand. It can be an excellent tool for advertising your self, your experience and skillsets. It can also really help to boost your respect and credibility for a position. The online world is such an important resource now-a-days, it is even being used to research new candidates for jobs. I have done a fair bit of hiring in my position, and do rely partly on the search engines to find additional information out about a candidate. Its useful to search for the person to find a personal website or blog they operate, or to find out about press releases or articles they are mentioned in or have written. Even social networking sites are a great way to find out a little more about a person.

Now the interested part is this, is everything YOU post online under your real name something you would want a potential employer to see? Or even a boy/girlfriend or spouse for that matter? How much different do you behave in a work environment than you do on any social networking sites. I’m amazed at what you can find out about a person online and how they behave after they tell you the usual polished answers to questions in an interview not suspecting you might ever find anything different. Often the pictures or comments people have online show more about how they interact with others than they would ever be willing to tell you. And would a bad online portfolio affect my decision in hiring someone? You bet I would! An article I read from the Boston Globe listed that:

Nearly 77 percent of recruiters said last year that they use search engines to check out candidates, and 35 percent have eliminated a candidate due to such a search, a survey by ExecuNet found.

So, now that you can see that there really is an impact to what you put online, what are you going to do about it? Do you want to build a positive portfolio hoping you will be googled sometime or just keep a low profile and hope that there is nothing bad to be found. Either way, its your call, but if you are already online or going to be, here are some things to consider.

• Get yourself a real domain name (your name if available) if you have a website, don’t bother with the free hosting services, there are way too many drawbacks.
• Run some searches on your own name, nicknames, name and city to find any existing content so you know what already out there about you.
• Use your name consistently on your site, email, business cards, articles, online comments, resume, and any site where your posts or information is public. You’ll be much easier to find that way!
• Clean up any unwanted info and contact site owners to remove or alter information about you that is not accurate or desirable for you to have online. There are services and websites that cache and archive everything so once it’s online, its there forever, but the visibility of it will slowly diminish to the point of never being found.
• Keep your social networking sites’ portfolios consistent and limit yourself to only posting what is appropriate to have a potential employer see.
• Build yourself a online portfolio and resume that does show what you want to be seen about you.

I’d love to see some comments on other things that people recommend to manager their online portfolio. I personally recommend Linkedin as a resource, its a business focused social networking site and an excellent resource for a professional portfolio. Lots of ways to network in your industry and cross industries and excellent search tools for finding jobs and potential hires. View my profile here at linkedin and feel free to send a connection request.

Posted by Mike King under Business | 1 Comment »

I get a LOT of questions at my graphics company from people who are either interested in getting into the 3D industry for a career or at least personally as a hobby. There are a lot of important things to know and I wanted to shed my own opinions on this.

First the career angle.

Now, I’m not trying to discourage everyone here from getting into 3D. I personally love it, and get a lot of enjoyment in the artwork and graphics I deliver to many happy clients and of course my own personal work. However, there seems to be a lot of people simply thinking 3D would be such a great career and so enjoyable and all they have to do is create some cool 3D stuff. Wrong!

3D is a tough career. Its a cut throat business, has many many different skill and styles available and is extremely competitive and for the most part, does not pay all that impressively. Wow, seems a little more dreary now doesn’t it? Don’t worry, lots of upsides. Work is always a downer in some ways, and the 3D world is still work you realize? Right, moving on. I constantly get asked as well what schools and courses I recommend for people to take and specifically which schools I see the best candidates from. Well, quite frankly, I don’t see any schools or programs consistently delivering better artists than the others. I believe it is nearly entirely based on the talents and determination of each individual, not the school or courses they took. So, I honestly don’t recommend any particular school or courses. It depends more on what you want to do and what you already know. If you want to do character modeling, study anatomy. If you want to master lighting, study real world sets, photography and filming. If animation is your thing, then learn from cartoons and master the art of story telling with minimal details in your models. A great animator can bring a pencil to life. So, you need to find what you are most interested in. If you don’t know, then often some general courses for 3D animation and modeling might help spark the interest, but I’d recommend you find this out on your own as a hobbiest instead of wasting your money on something you don’t even know you like yet. Explore it on your own and if you like it then do some research on various programs available to determine if they are what you need to expand your knowledge. Everyone learns differently as well, some need to be taught, some learn on there own and some just can’t learn certain skills well at all. Depending on how you learn, you need to decide if school is right for that or self study and hard work. You definitely don’t NEED to have formal education to get into 3D, but it can certainly help. No matter what, the skills need to be there though, the education itself will NOT get you a job.

As for the big picture for the career, if you don’t absolutely LOVE the idea of working in the 3D industry, then don’t bother pursuing any further, just skip down to the 3D as a Hobby section below. You have to have a really strong desire and determination to get good and be successful, since there is so much competition. So, a career in 3D has many paths. There are animators, lighters, character animators, riggers, real time model experts, texture artists, special f/x 3D artist, motion capture animators, and all the related aspects like 3D compositors, technical directors, cinematographers, 3D matte painters, and the list goes on.

If you know specifically what kind of job you are after, you probably already know which of those is most interested to you. If not, then you need to find out or be in a world of knowing a little about a lot of things. Not many companies are looking for those type of 3D artists. There are some production companies and a number of great broadcast based jobs that need a well rounded 3D artist to handle everything from the modeling to the editing but this is certainly more rare.

As hinted, most companies look for artists with specific talents and skills for what they need. It is wise to specialize in just a select few of these and preferably the most closely related ones. This will allow you to focus your skills and master a specific area. You will then be able to show an exceptional portfolio, instead of a mediocre (or bad) one, like the vast majority of new grads and entry level artists.

Finding those First Few Jobs

Resumes get you interviews and interviews get you jobs in the normal business world. Well in 3D, your portfolio gets you interviews AND jobs. Of course, a bad interview can still take that job opportunity away but generally, the portfolio is your best friend and is all a hiring company really cares about when screening applicants. So, it cannot be good, it must be great!

See my upcoming article named, Developing a Great 3D Portfolio for guidelines on how to do this. Once you have your portfolio built, you can start looking for that perfect job. There are so many places to go about doing this, I’m simply going to list some options without any specifics since you need to target the areas looking for your skill set and type of portfolio.

1. Traditional Job search tools like classifieds, job boards specific company web sites, etc. Target your postings for specific jobs.
2. Online job boards and search sites with specifically for finding and filling jobs.
3. Online job sites specific to the industry you are looking for.
4. Online portfolio sites like linked in and other network building sites.
5. Community sites and forums for 3D content, applications and artists. These can help you build a lot of connections around a specific area of 3D.

3D as a Hobby

So maybe a full time job in 3D isn’t your thing or your simply not sure of it yet. Well, then 3D as a hobby is a great thing to get into. Its fun and there are some absolutely amazing artists to learn from online! A numbers of great online communities for artists exist both for styles of 3D and for 3D related to specific applications. You get to create anything that comes to your mind and you can express yourself in your own unique way!

The image at the right is an image from a scene I’ve created simply for fun in 3D. I’ll fully animate it next and I can truly tell you its been a joy to make it. Lots of work as well, but a joy! So, you’ll need to decide what software you want to use for 3D and what you want to do with it. I do all my work in the impressive 3D package called modo 301, and still a few of my more difficult animation tasks in Lightwave 3D, an older package but still a great contender for general 3D graphics. Other commercial packages include Maya, XSI and 3D Studio. There are some entry level free applications available as well to get you started. Blender 3D is an great open source package with an amazing feature set and good community. Also, there is DAZ Studio and of course always google sketchup.

Either way you look at 3D, its fun to create anything in your imagination, just keep in mind its a tough industry and requires a LOT of learning to master. Take a look at the commercial trial versions available or some of the free packages, both will give you a good glimpse into the 3D artists life and will let you also determine where your interests are, whether it really as a career option or as a hobby.

Posted by Mike King under 3D | 1 Comment »