Jarvs Tasker was 28 when a chronic illness forced her to leave teaching. It was 2019, and with that blow, the career that had been part of her life came to an end.
She didn’t wait around. She started volunteering on the PlayStation YouTube channel and discovered something she hadn’t expected: the video game industry was more like her old job than she had imagined. “Managing a community is a lot like managing a classroom full of children”, she says, “so there are a lot of transferable skills”.
Seven years later, this Exeter resident in the UK runs Jarvs Indie Insights, a communications and marketing company for the industry. And she says she earns much more now than she did as a teacher: “It probably would have taken me around 20 years in teaching to earn what I earn now”, she told the BBC.
For her, the key isn’t her résumé: “Passion is the most important thing”. Would you dare to start over in another industry?