I wrote the following (with some minor edits) on AskMetafilter in response to a user’s question, “Is someone with approximately one year of college and an Adobe ACE cert in Flash CS3 employable? And when I say employable, I don’t mean flipping hamburgers. I mean as a Flash or ActionScript designer/developer.”

What you need isn’t a degree. A degree in “multimedia design” doesn’t mean anything to me, or any other serious creative/dev house. What you need is experience, a body of work that’s pretty damn nice and a passion that you demonstrate by building things just for fun, researching what’s new and edgy and clearly taking the initiative to learn on your own and continue to do so.

We hire people almost entirely based on what we perceive are their ability to learn and absorb new concepts, what they’ve built themselves and even more importantly, their passion towards doing both those things. You have to live, eat and breathe this stuff. You have to work hard to stay a step ahead of the crowd. And you’ll run into a lot of issues that you have to be willing to work through to solve.

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