Shanel Charles

The best career advice for me, since having to pivot quickly, is kind of going with the flow. Having your heart set on something and going for it, but being open to other opportunities. There are so many jobs in the world that people don't even know about. I think networking and speaking to people in the industry you want to be in and just being knowledgeable about all these different opportunities is important, because you might think you really want to do something. In college, I thought I really wanted to be an editor, and then I got into post, and I was like, oh, I think post-producing is more of my field. Then I got into TV, and I'm like, oh, I could do posts in different areas. I've interviewed for a lot of fashion jobs, photo shoots and stuff like that, assets, magazines that have post-producers who do touch-ups and stuff like that. So just sort of being knowledgeable and open to how fast the industry is changing, how fast technology's changing, and finding creative ways to adapt. TV slowed down here, but gaming's actually doing exceptionally well. So how to pivot to that. And who knows where things might be in another 10 years? So I think just being adaptable, open-minded, eager to learn, and just excited for new opportunities, because things change fast.

Especially gaming is so male-dominated. I think finding your voice is important, and that took me a lot of years to do that. Being direct is really important. I think as women, we're always expected to sort of be nice, and when you're in a project manager or a producer role or management or a lot of different roles, you really need to be direct when asking for things, when setting boundaries, when setting deadlines. So I would just say it's important to be likable, but learning your voice, learning how to communicate with people directly, but also it's very important to be respected, especially if you work in a male-dominated industry.

I think with TV production in general, just the slowdown of the industry, how it's been impacting New York and LA in particular. Those were always big cities for production, and that has slowed down tremendously. A lot of work has been shipped offshore, so I would just say where the industry is at in TV production, that's always difficult. When it comes to gaming, I would say challenges is really just trying to keep up with the technology as fast as you can. There's always so many advancements, and just educating yourself on things as they're adapting. There's always faster ways to do things now, and just trying to keep yourself aware of all of the AI that's happening, not necessarily using it to do your job, but using it to educate yourself and better ways you can do things. You're just trying to keep up with technology as best as you can these days, with gaming in particular.

I would say trying to keep a healthy work-personal balance, especially now that I work in the office every single day, whereas before I was working remote for the last few years, so just trying to balance that. In these types of industries, TV is notorious for this, the long hours, so it's really trying to keep your mental state well. I think Rockstar does a really great job with that, because they will offer benefits for fitness or just mental well-being. Another thing with this job in particular is obviously the deadline, because we're working on something that is extremely time-sensitive. So I think trying to balance my mental well-being and the dedication that I just naturally have to my job. I'm just naturally passionate about my job, I love working, I'm very lucky to do what I've always wanted to do, so that makes it sometimes easy for me to just kind of bury myself in work, but over the years, it's so important to not burn yourself out, because that's how you sort of lose the passion that you had when you went into it.