You really need to create a Certification Course

General Feedback & Requests
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I need professional recognition like unity-users have.

Why won’t you make a certification course like Unity?

It would not only be the way to prove your competence to employers, but also be a way to learn everything about Unreal Engine that you need to know,

Also, learning unreal would be much safer as people will be able to learn from certified users instead shady amateurs

You can say that “the best way to prove your competence to employers is your porffolio”, but this is nonsence, do you mean universities should not exist as well?

  • Not everyone has time and money to invest into creating their own projects, not every project would cover everything that UE certified course would have, and all these bs are just bs excuses that Unity didn’t use to create a proper Certification. Pretty much every serious software has certification courses.

Please kindly indicate whether you are going to create certification in the foreseeable future

If they don’t know, it’s probably not even planned yet
Big companies plan everything well ahead of time,
Probably means that we won’t get certification for Unreal in the next 5-10 years,

Consider switching to Unity if you are a serious developer

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Who would consider such bureaucracy even remotely useful ? Act of verbal communication as long as 3 to 5 minutes and few glances at previous works/code is more than enough to determine rough level of competence.

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Ask Unity why they made such a “stupid” move. And why they are more successful than Epics
Or why universities, colleges, .net certification(coding), exists in the first place. Just learn everything yourself mate, and then just look at the glance, that’s enough.

>Who would consider such bureaucracy even remotely useful ?
Are you “cool” teenage anarachist or what? Every serious company would and does. There is a good reason WHY colleges, unis exist, and a lot of SERIOUS software have CERTIFICATION. Unity as a direct competitor does not think it is “not useful”. Same as Microsoft with their certification courses, CISCO, and every **** software that needs you to be a serious, responsible professional. Wake up, grow up.

>Act of verbal communication as long as 3 to 5 minutes
Best HR ever. I think we need to revise our education system for creating a next level hr-s like you. Or maybe we should start a certification course based on an 3-5 minutes interview with you? Do you even remotely understand a process of any kind of certification and what it means? It checks all aspect of an entity you are studying, and best practice would be looking if a person have already passed all professional tests, rather than your “3-5 mins”

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Even if they do create one, it won’t achieve anything. Also, no certification course is going to teach you “everything you need to know” about Unreal - only experience can do that. For the record, Epic do actually have some ‘verified’ courses on Udemy, which are basically the same thing.

As someone who employs Unreal Devs and works as one for other companies too - I can tell you that from my experience, qualifications and certification courses prove nothing, other than the person who has it can follow a list of simple instructions. When given a real-world task that actually requires some initiative and their own experience, they crumble. They are an out-of-date concept that frankly doesn’t apply to the modern games industry.

If anything, these courses are actually harmful because they put you down a path of thinking that usually is out-of-date before it’s even added to the syllabus. This is especially true to Universities who are wrapped up in political, bureaucratic nonsense. Big companies employ based on CV’s because they have huge HR departments as a necessity, but many of us consider that to be an out-of-date concept and might also be why huge companies tend to have such high staff turnover rates.

In fact, if you want my advice - skip university altogether, get a temporary job and spend the new time you have trawling the internet and putting the time into teaching yourself, rather than getting yourself into lifelong debt and writing BS dissertations. (Revealing a few hidden demons there, perhaps). Every single person I know who has pursued a career out of genuine drive and interest rather than out of a degree they ended up doing has done well for themselves, myself included.

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Heh what a joke.
Nobody would hire me anymore because I would never pay for this :slight_smile:

Not having a certified piece of paper then would mean I have no idea how to use Unreal Engine 4 properly, pretty accurate HR system I guess…

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/BrUnO

I will not argue with you as you have valid arguments but life does not work that way so often, maybe the game developer scene is different (which i do not know). In reality many Clients, HR people and (Top-) Managers have simply no clue (and you are lucky when they know and admit it) about game development and when you show any certificate you give them some kind of “assurance”. They need it for themselves and so a certificate has some value and is an advantage when you try to get funds or a job. And i speak here not about low paid projects …

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Certification no matter for what system/platform/language only guarantees you have touched the subject. No certificate will replace talent and experience. Creation of games it is just not about programming or knowing how to use tools, person needs talent and creativity, no course in the world can provide that.

If I look someone’s profile at Artstation, see he posting the workflow he uses, if it is good and makes sence, I will ask him for an interview and probably will have a 15min talk (because Im polite and will offer some coffee too), and will be enough to decide if I will or not contract him.

I have encountered in several years people which made courses and know nothing, while met a good deal of people which learned by experience and know more. I used to work in the banking industry (12 years), and a person having CISCO certification would just mean for me I would expend less with that person.

Unreal user base almost trippled in 1.5 years (1.3million for 4.2million), the competition is getting bigger, and it is a must people start to go self-learning and focusing on areas they are more talented and then going after generalization to get an edge.

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Not intending to.

I haven’t seen enough data, neither publicly available nor internal, to come to the same conclusion. And not intending to look into it.

I’m fine with openly questioning feasibility of their existence in the current form.

Neither of these. I’m fine, thanks.

Seriousness should be defined, before attempting to discuss it. But no, not every. Luckily, there are still enough entities, that are putting more sense into recruitment process, other than certificate validation.

I have fair belief, that certification should only exist, where potential damage, caused by misuse, is not limited to financial extent only, and in case with game engine, judgement about competence of job-seekers can be safely put solely in hands of the recruiter.

I am not related to HR. Just having to deal with fruits of their labor occasionally.

Not sure how you divided everything into “we” and “me”.
Applicable to a game engine(and even further, to be fair), I would unquestionably prefer 3-5 minutes interview over a folder of certificates.

A certain entity, re-assures you, that the other entity in question has met certain criteria. Nothing more.

Been involved in dismissal of several fully certified gentlemen during first weeks on position. So I have different opinion here.

Speaking of opinions. You do not have to agree with mine. They can co-exist absolutely fine. You might feel uncomfortable having such post in your thread, but not everyone deems that certification and all that it tugs behind, is a good way, as applicable to a game engine.

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That’s why recruiters use test projects. You got a task, few days to complete. And you send your test project to given company. You need to prove you’re able to create. That’s it.
If there’s no developer in recruiting team, any kind of ridiculous certificate won’t actually help to pick the best developer for a project/team.

Every person who done Unity certificate claims it’s a dump test, not checking anything useful. It’s like a test for a driver licence.
But such certificates work well if you want to charge other people to teach them Unity. Because you got “certificate of professionalism”.

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My argument here would be not to work for someone who doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about, I can’t think of anything more frustrating.

Before game development I worked in the pro-audio industry - where the self-declared “Industry Standard” DAW was Pro Tools. There are several extremely expensive certification courses in Pro Tools, and I myself took two of them. Did it help me get a job? Did it hell - because the people who really knew their stuff were given jobs because they actually gained experience and knowledge of their own accord. There’s a big, big difference between knowing something and being able to actually apply it.

When I started my company, two of the gentlemen I started it with both had full honors degrees in programming - while I had never written a line of code in my life. However, I had been using unreal engine for about six/seven years prior to that, and before that I mostly modded really old games that shipped with editors from the 90’s. To cut to the chase, neither of those guys work in my company or even this industry anymore, and I’ve been running the company on my own and the sole programmer for around three years.

And for ever further experience on this subject - I started freelancing alongside my company in January this year. My CV has no qualifications on it - and I’ve got so much work on I’m literally turning people away.

So in my very well founded opinion, certifications are a load of old tosh. The best way to find out somebodies ability is to talk to them, provide them with some simple tests then go from there. A certification will get you nowhere without backup.

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To scam people.

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In some areas, like game development/art there’s no quantitative way to test someone’s skills. When you look at the things they test it’s really dumb things like the name and locations of UI elements. In the Unity certification they even have a thing about explaining the value of the Unity asset store. The only thing that can really test someone’s skills is looking at the person’s work and the amount of time they put into it.

I don’t know of any place that values these types of certifications. At best, the value is tricking someone that doesn’t know any better.

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Personally, someone having a certificate is very useful to me in deciding whether to hire them - I can instantly tell that they have no idea what they’re talking about and I can safely turn them down.

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I get certifications for say… CISCO networking admins because it’s a very specific and (relatively) narrow topic that CISCO themselves promote and it has immediate and “persistent” real world applications, but I absolutely cannot understand or condone certificates for creative work, especially when it comes to something as mind-bogglingly broad and chaotic as as game development. Every developer worth their salt knows that a) you can’t learn these things in a classroom and b) you never stop learning. Even the best and most exhaustive certificate is worthless within 6 months. The folks at Unity are at best ignorant for perpetuating their certification, but considering participation in their certification tests is pretty expensive I am more than willing to think of it as a malicious scam. If an employer is asking you for certificates or diplomas or whatever else you have other than your work portfolio, it’s a gigantic red flag to get away while the getting’s good.

The only truth in the whole industry is that a professional can almost instantly judge your abilities from a glance at your work, one strong portfolio piece means more than a million certificates.

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What a pile of nonsense
Professionals don’t know anything about programming or unreal engine. All they know is what they taught in hr college. That’s it. All you say is your teenage fantasies about employers who don’t require you to have a bachelor’s degree, that universtites are “scam”, I bet you are an edgy 12 years old anarchist who is too lazy to study.

The part about experience is the best

I have already covered your bs in the op post

Do you want me to go deeper and completely show your incopmtence? You never worked in your life.
You know nothing about development process.

  1. You are not going to get experience without a certificate. Why the heck you think someone will invite to work on any project if you have no way to prove your knowledge first.
    You may make some small personal projects and then be invited into a little bit bigger projects, but this will be a much longer pathway to a normal job, like 5+ years minimum

  2. Your role in the project

Okay, let’s say you listed some average game in your resume
How the f*** “the professional” will know which parts you did and really did? Or maybe it’s a blueprint project while you are applying for a c++ job, or you just used marketplace assets or open source plugins

  1. You clearly know nothing about anything
    Why the f you think any studio is going to spend money on having a developer, no, a senior developer on looking at every resume. Are you 5 years old or what? Do you know how much senior developers make and how much HRs? Are you sure that anyone would spend developer resources that are like 50/hr on hr job?
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When interviewed by a well known outsourcing company (company does HD remakes and ports of original console best sellers) they put a pack of 5 seniors making me all kinds of questions. So yes they do.

When interviewed to work on Bloodborn, 2 team leaders + a translator spent 4 hours making me questions. So yes, they do.

When interviewed by RockStar, EA or Gameloft, the first thing they did was request code samples and make me explain to a lead what exactly is that code doing… So, yes they do.

I heard in places like EpicGames you have to spend a whole workday in office with them and everyone you meet will make you all kinds of questions… So, yes bet they do.
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I think a certificate course would be awesome, especially for someone like me who has a math disability to learn blueprints well

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And such certificate won’t teach you math. The certificate is about people taking money so they can print you a nice paper.
It’s not an opportunity to learn an entirely new area of expertise. It’s just simple and short course, few lessons about how to use UI and how to click buttons. They don’t care if you learned anything as long as you pay.

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So, you have been interviewed by Rockstar, Sony, Ea, Gameloft. What next? Obama shaked your hand?

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I never met Obama.