As a production manager at a small animation company, I currently train new graduates coming out of Art Institute as we hire them right out of college... and I'm finding that while almost all of new hires are great artists, very few of them are ready to actually 'have a job'. The portfolios and resumes are great, but when it comes to real life animation production, a project that they may have trained on in college may have had a deadline of 2 or 3 months; But in real crunch-time production and dealing with TV, Film, Video Game and other App companies, the real timeline is maybe 2 weeks from start to finish. This comes as quite a shock to some of the new hires, and in the past few years we've had just a handful of people that can 'get' it and deal with the sometimes insane deadlines.

What I want to instill in these youngsters is The Value of Time, Dignity of Simplicity, Wisdom of Economy, Virtue of Practice, and Improvement of Talent.

Learning better and better ways to use these programs is always the goal, so the more comfortable you can get with this and use time-saving techniques, the more fun you can have, the better looking your work will be, and the faster your workflow and results will go.