[VR Question]

So this question is preferably for someone in the industry or knows of someone in the industry.
I'm currently in the military and I want to start taking advantage of my free college so when I get out I can hopefully get a career developing VR. The only issue is I have no clue what major would be helpful with that? Any input?

[pkcable]

What level of programming knowledge do you have? A Computer Science degree, or some sort of business management degree is probably a good idea. Maybe Digital Marketing? You might also consider a technical school and taking programming classes. Perhaps @KermEd or @EgoAnt, 2 VR developers I know who are VRHeads members might be able to offer suggestions?

[KermEd]

Fair question.

So, first I'll premise this with a few small points. We are starting to see more developers in the industry than available jobs. And there are multiple streams in VR. We have AR, MR and VR with solutions for games, film or business. I strongly recommend knowing a bit about each but picking a specific niche area.

For courses, I'm one of the few people I know that is self taught. It is very rare for a self taught individual to break into the industry. And in our city, we have the only VR studio doing video games. There are only 4 other companies in VR, one does 360 film, another does Geomatics, and the other 2 - we built their VR platform for them. So the industry varies a lot from city to city.

The best program to get in, is a comp sci degree. You need experience in creating games and game experiences (even business VR people want it to be gamified). So you'll want to learn Unity, and Unreal. A back end and web front end experience helps a lot, so learning about Node, and react, and angular and associated frameworks will help you a lot.

What they don't say though is my job is about 75% multimedia and 25% coding. So some 3d model experience, and animation experience, will take you a long way.

Once all that is done, make sure to add a one page portfolio to your resume - they want to see a game or app you made from scratch more than education.

So, at most places, this is their hiring hierarchy

Portfolio + Education > Portfolio > Education > Game Developer or Multimedia > General Purpose Developer > Self Taught

You want to be as far to the left as you can. Once you hit those points, apply!

Lastly, jobs now are almost entirely word of mouth and hiring based on social experiences. So make them like you, and get along with the team. Have a strong online social presence.

That's all I got :