During my interview in mid-June this year with Jessica Lindl, vice president and global head of education at Unity Technologies, I learned that Unity Learn Premium will be accessible to everyone in perpetuity, beginning today, June 23. This was originally announced as a three-month offer on March 19 to support the development community during COVID-19 for learning at home.
This is wonderful news for learning professionals who want to reskill or extend their skills, either in connection with their current career or to begin a new career entirely. It may not be for everyone, however. In the interview, when asked about technical reskilling, Lindl had this to say:
Over the years, out of everyone who plays a video game, a subset of those players really want to become creators themselves. And about half of those players want to become creators because it is something that they want to build a career. The other half of the players who want to become creators like tinkering, building, and creating as a hobby. So we've always focused on that whole subset of creators in our education program but we haven't deliberately provided for them: "Here's exactly the job pathways you can be taking and the work that you need to do to be reskilling." Even before the pandemic, providing a much more supportive guide on those job pathways was a key focus for us. But now, we are working to determine how we can support the massive amount of workers globally who are needing to reskill into other careers because they've lost their jobs as a result of a global pandemic.
Our primary focus is actually on people who have not yet entered the tech industry and who really have a strong enthusiasm and a strong intrinsic motivation to be able to repurpose their career into a technology job using Unity as a platform.
My belief is that the Unity Learn Premium training will require a dedicated effort to complete; for the former Unity Learn program described in Learning Solutions February 28, 2019, the recommendation was four to five hours per week for eight weeks. While we don't have a new definitive estimate, even given a strong enthusiasm and intrinsic motivation for repurposing one's career, the amount of content in the Premium package will likely require more time. On the other hand, with the new offer, the Premium programming will cost nothing to try out, and some readers will have the time available to devote to the curriculum.
Unity Learn Premium content is designed to develop in-demand skills like AR, VR, and AI development. It includes:
- A Unity C# survival guide
- Artificial Intelligence for beginners
- Top AR/VR courses
- Creating high-fidelity game visuals
Full details are available on the Unity blog.