A few months ago, William Bennet reminded victims of the great recession that chronic unemployment was entirely their fault with the standard charm conservatives like him tend to bring to the issue: “‘Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married.’ It’s time for men to man up.” Hyperbole and sexism aside, does playing more videogames actually make it harder for one to get a job? A recent profile of a self-professed high school videogame “addict” and her employer, one Ravi Pendse, suggests that spending almost five work-years at the console actually gives her a leg up for future employers: 

One of the mistakes we make, he says, is to assume that young people like Albright are wasting time playing these games. “Don’t look only at how much time they spend doing these things,” he said. “Instead, look at what they can do after they do these games. These games are very demanding — to get to level 14, you first have to get past level 13. It’s demanding.”

For years now, Pendse has been captivated by young people and how they are transforming the world, learning technology at an exponential rate, in spite of strong opposition or foot-dragging from school districts and parents who don’t get it about technology.

Pendse works with Cisco, the San Jose technology company that manufactures networking equipment.

For years, Pendse has said that we should throw out all our cliche thinking about young people, and their tendencies to “waste” time texting, playing video games, and downloading what some of us think are useless YouTube videos showing a guy shooting his daughter’s laptop.

This may seem a little far-fetched, but think about all the original disdain for social media that has now turned into an overwhelming need to hire up as many “social media specialists” as possible. More generally, the overall value of videogames imparting real-world skills seems to be their unique ability to make our relationship with technology almost second-nature. 

How’s that for résumé padding?

[via The Wichita Eagle]