Hi, I posted this on Reddit about a week ago, but thought I'd ask you all your opinion:

A little background:

I've just been made redundant from my last job (not a game developer). As part of the redundancy package they've offered me £750 of training expenses that can only be spent on training courses. However, they can be any kind of training course. Seriously, I could do knitting and bat training if I really wanted to.

I already have a first class honours degree in game design and before this last job spent around a total of four years working in the industry, mostly as a 3D environment artist and for a short time as a tester. My games design course was new when I started it (2003) and they mostly focused on art, hence becoming an artist.

However, my goal has always been towards game design and I'm now trying to look for a job back in the industry but as a designer or design related role, be that level designer, content/creation/quest designer etc. This is a bit of a problem as I don't have any experience in actual design, only art and testing. So my plan is to build up a design portfolio while I have free time and start applying late this year/early next year, and I may as well take advantage of the training money that's available to me. I have plenty of experience in art packages obviously and some good knowledge of level editing in packages like Hammer and Unreal. I've been teaching myself some scripting and coding in GameMaker but am eager to start really focusing on coding in Unity and Unreal.

Any suggestions for courses that could be worth it? I don't need a degree or diploma as they're too long and I already have one (plus while my game design degree did teach me plenty, I don't believe it was entirely necessary). I could opt for spending the money on a bunch of online courses like those at Udemy but I'd have to buy a lot of them to make it worth it as they seem quite short and cheap. It seems these days that youtube could almost teach me everything I need to know too. I'm based in Oxford in the UK and I can't really move any time soon, or at least not until I find a games job.

I could of course just spend that training money on something else like a language course as I have little faith in game dev courses, but if I can find a good game dev course then I may as well spend it on that.

Thanks!

I don't know any training courses worth 750 euros for gamedev. But honestly I'd suggest putting it to some sort of art. Gamedev is pretty easy to pick up if you understand software engineering. The design part is the tricky bit.

I could of course just spend that training money on something else like a language course as I have little faith in game dev courses, but if I can find a good game dev course then I may as well spend it on that.

I recommend in-person training rather than online training. If you want to go for language, that's fine.
What language are you thinking of?
What'll probably happen is that you'll get a job offer before the training is done, and it'll conflict
with the training course so you'll have to drop out. But that's okay too.

Thanks both, I was thinking of German as both my girlfriend and I are quite keen on looking at jobs in Germany, and also Bulgarian (but that's simply because my girlfriend is Bulgarian ;) )

monk, if the language's usefulness in getting a game job is at all a factor, then German is a good choice.
gamedevmap also shows quite a few game studios in Bulgaria, so either way you're good.

I recommend you study simple jobs like cooking, sports, and so on, well, they are not so simple as seems, but it shall really help to find job.

Oh I can't edit adn add, so I meant that job must help to "stay at ground hard", don't know english phrases fot this, but think you understand me, stable income and do your games at evenings.