Short courses to pursue after Class XII to catapult your career options

Not everyone who receives their Class XII marksheet hurries down the trodden path of a graduation degree. Last week, we looked at a few certificate courses that can supplement and often, substitute the customary three-year degree. While some reap good money, others help build ancillary professional skills. Here's looking at a few more such courses.  

Game Design your Future

Game Designing, an increasingly lucrative career in smart phone-ready India, is an area that benefits from intensive certificate programmes. Says Rajeev Thakre, Centre Head, Arena Animation, Andheri, "With movies being adapted into video games and vice versa, digital game development and game testing are a couple of cool trades with good money." 
Rajeev vouches that the onslaught of mobile gaming has created a huge demand for professionals trained in pre-production (devising the story line and other essential elements like characters, weapons, backgrounds, terrains, plot movement, climax and laying it out on paper); integration (assembling and digitizing these loose elements into one composite game using relevant software) and back-end programming (assigning movement and control to the now-integrated elements of the game). Of these, the first two are the forte of the game designer and can be picked up through courses similar to Arena's separate six-month and two-year programmes. 
While the two-year course is priced at `2 lakh, its shorter version is customized as per learner needs, with the average cost of the course amounting to `50 lakh. "Freshers may start out at `10,000-15,000 but a hardworking two years can push them up to the `40,000-50,000 bracket," informs Rajeev about the earning potential of the field, adding that like in every field, personal skill and performance carries great importance.

Matter over Moolah?

Not all games that require strategic designing are digital in nature, Professor Uday Athavankar, Industrial Design Centre (IDC) IIT Bombay, reveals. "The domain of traditional games is vast. There are skill-based games, strategy-based games, luck-based games, educational games, games for parties—sometimes all these elements go into designing a new one," the Professor shares. 

At IDC, which offers an eight-day course in game designing to both independent entrants and IITians as part of their curriculum, future-designers are encouraged to make social interaction the basis of their creations. Athavankar points out that in the age of media overload and limited human interaction, board games that push you to walk up to strangers or observe the other players' responses can mean much more than a pleasure activity. 
Athavankar admits that the monetary returns are modest when it comes to traditional game designing citing a rare example of Funskool, which adopted some of his students' designs. "The motivation here then, is the educational element our creations impart—IDC alumni often design children's games with inputs from children, enriching the curriculum of schools and NGOs," he explains. A designer with a solid entrepreneurial plan can still haul in money, reassures Athavankar, who urges his students to create low-cost games that jazz up tedious lessons of science, history or geography!

IT and Beyond

While many troop to engineering colleges for a degree in Information Technology, there are various certificate/ diploma courses that can train candidates just as well. Debasis Das, Manager Curriculum and Training, Jetking Infotrain, talks about some popular one-month certificate courses such as Laptop Specialist, Cloud Computing, Network Security, Ethical Hacking at his institute. One may wonder that even as the courses sound interesting, what are their professional implications? 
Debasis reckons for candidates from technical backgrounds, short-term courses like these help in personal up-skilling, since "recruiters appreciate candidates who have technical expertise in emerging fields that aren’t usually a part of a regular curriculum".  For freshers from non-technical backgrounds, Debasis recommends more exhaustive courses that give a basic understanding of IT as a whole, before choosing the specialization. But chronicled as curriculum vitae add-ons, they can give your regular engineering degree an edge.
He goes on to add that candidates with these skillsets can become enablers in IT & IMS functions across industries during installation, maintenance and troubleshooting. With substantial experience, they would be involved in the planning, feasibility and consulting roles for architecture and design of models for both internal and external projects.
At Jetking, most courses cost approximately `6,000 and are for beginners, the next best thing to actual experience in the field.