If you’re worried that your kids are wasting too much of their summer playing video games, there could be an unexpected payoff in the future. A new study by the Rutgers Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) reveals that gaming, modifying games (modding), and related hobbies can form a career pathway into the high-demand IT field, especially for adolescents and teens with supportive parents.
“Students don’t realize it at first, but playing video games and having related hobbies is often really helpful when choosing a career and even while job hunting,” said Eliza Peterson, a research analyst and lead author of the study. “For example, if they’re hosting a Minecraft server for their friends, they could parlay those skills and lessons into a Server Administration major, and later, maybe a career in that area of IT.”
As part of a larger study supported by the National Science Foundation, Rutgers researchers interviewed 43 students and alumni of the Ivy Tech Community College School of Information Technology in Indiana. The interviews, conducted over three years, revealed a common trajectory. Most participants became interested in technology at a young age, often while bonding with their parents, and more than half of them (26 of 43) eventually developed a hobby such as gaming, modifying games, coding, programming, or building computers.
As teens, they did not expect that their passion for playing Minecraft or Fortnite could eventually lead to a job. But they eventually had a revelation – what the researchers call the “hobby-to-career reckoning” – and decided to study IT in their community college. To read the full story.