Curious Question About Careers

[Sonshine]

Hi, I'm curious. Is it possible for a sim to max a career to lev 10 within a normal sim lifetime? It just seems like my sim's progress is sooooooo slow!!! By the time they get to death's door, they *might* be at lev 6. My painter sim is close and he is only at lev 8. I tried the doctor one from GTW and it says that the ideal mood is focused. I took her to work focused one day,but it just didn't last very long and there's no way to maintain that mood during work hours. So this is prompting me to ask is this even possible? Did EA make the jobs a bit too hard?

[grimsoul]

One way to maintain focus at the doctor job is have your painter get focused and paint some math paintings and have sim take them to and hang them around the work area.
Or edit the lot and some focus item around the place.
Edit to add if your sim has a high charisma you can use the phone to try and negotiate a bonus which will raise job meter if it works but can also.lower it if it fails. So save before trying.
Or If you Zim has a high program skill you can try to hack work performance.

[ClayMask]

It's definitely possible to max a career in a normal lifetime.  It helps a lot if you make some quick whim points and buy the connections reward before you join, so you start at level 4.  Also, try to go to work in a very state of whatever the ideal mood is.  This is a lot more important if it's not an active career.  For active careers, the most important thing is finishing enough tasks to reach the final tick mark on the bar you see when you're at work.

[Sonshine]

Thanks! I've been having my programmer sim make mobile apps, mods, and stuff like that. Once I did have her do a hack, but I can make her hack some more if that helps more.

I'll try the items trick to raise focus. What all is there besides chess sets and paintings to raise focus? This (the doctor) is another family which is just starting out and her husband is in a different career, but not a painter.

[dodi90]

I guess it's already been proven that being focused while ACTIVELY going to career did not help the progress bar raised faster. Only if you go passively. It might help to reach the gold performance somewhat faster but in the end, your career progress land at the exact same pace. Doctor is definitely the hardest one to master once you get the promotions requirement to do surgery 3 times. Not all patients that come need it and while you surely can give them wrong diagnosis, your job performance took hit too so it will only slow you down.

[grimsoul]

Check out Carl's guide to Focused Emotion and also    justproud2b's list ways to get focused.

[ClayMask]

Thanks! I've been having my programmer sim make mobile apps, mods, and stuff like that. Once I did have her do a hack, but I can make her hack some more if that helps more.

I'll try the items trick to raise focus. What all is there besides chess sets and paintings to raise focus? This (the doctor) is another family which is just starting out and her husband is in a different career, but not a painter.

Hacking can be a mixed experience.  In my personal experience, if my Sim only does it when very focused, they gain performance half the time and lost it half the time, and it takes a few hours.  It will satisfy a programming daily goal though, and it can be helpful to get a promotion the next day that your Sim wouldn't have gotten otherwise.  Also, some people have reported having a better experience with it than I did.  My half figure comes from a study I did where I tried it twenty times and loaded after each time.  For me, it only succeeded ten times.  I tried it 20 times each both with being barely very focused, and having an excessive amount of positive moodlets, and I only succeeeded nine times when I had more positive moodlets, so I'm going to say this didn't matter for me.  One person reported great success with it when using very inspired instead of very focused, but I haven't personally tried it.

Once your Sim completes the computer whiz aspiration, he or she will have access to the very best reward for raising work performance.  This is the ability to make connections on the computer.  You can use it once every 24 hours, doesn't take long, and it is guaranteed to raise work performance.  There are no failures with this one.

[dodi90]

Yeah hacking is somehow mixed, I tried saving and reloading trick too but found out two things. The first one, If you save while your sim is hacking and found out it is failure, if you tried to load again, even though the notification said you succeed in doing so, there is no job performance given (and thankfully no loss either). If you do it before attempting the hack progress and when you failed to hack again, every time you load and immediately hack again will always be failure. And this happen at max level programming and being focused while doing so.

Long story short, use precaution while hacking. Instead it is better to use charisma phone trick, you can queue Negotiate a bonus two times in a row while in reality you are only allowed once every 48hr if i am not mistaken. The chance of failure is lower I believe even without confident emotion.

Trying to complete computer whiz help but of course it takes approximately 1 week of your sim life before you can have make connection interaction while of course if you are following a career that 1 week to do it is equal to 2 promotions on any other jobs unless of course you choose to max Tech Guru career.

[Tixxis]

Very inspired does help with hacking. Don't ask me why, but I also hardly had a failure with it.
Sonshine, another thing that helps with careers is marital bliss i.e. renewing vows. It gives a great +3 happy moodlet that lasts for up to 48 hours and boosts all other positive moods.

[MissTrips]

The three things that I always do every day to help my sims get career boosts in the rabbit hole jobs:

Do the after-work daily tasks.  At the very least try for 50% complete if you have time issues, but some is better than none!

Get the sim in the right mood before leaving for work.  Get as many needs topped off as you can. Have a cooked good or better quality meal not just a quick one.  Showers, studying a fossil, pep talk in the mirror, computer research... whatever emotion you need, get the buff as close as possible to departure time for maximum bonus.

Work Hard!  Every day!  Sure it tanks your sim's fun meter and they come home stressed and out of fun, a very small cheap 1x2 pool will quickly fix that!  Come home, hop into the pool and swim around for an hour and your sim is happy again and ready to do those after work tasks!

[dodi90]

Very inspired does help with hacking. Don't ask me why, but I also hardly had a failure with it.
Sonshine, another thing that helps with careers is marital bliss i.e. renewing vows. It gives a great +3 happy moodlet that lasts for up to 48 hours and boosts all other positive moods.

This really need to be checked. Anyone who have access to xml / codes should look into this.

Work Hard!  Every day!  Sure it tanks your sim's fun meter and they come home stressed and out of fun, a very small cheap 1x2 pool will quickly fix that!  Come home, hop into the pool and swim around for an hour and your sim is happy again and ready to do those after work tasks!

I half agree on work hard thing. If your sims only have half fun bar before working, consider only work hard when your ideal mood is up. Since I found out that being tense make your performance stop progressing at all at normal and move at very slow pace during work hard.  If you have Carefree then go work hard all the way since you will never get tense anyway. For new sim that didn't have carefree only do work hard when your fun meter near full to get max result.

[imayu94]

Running several practice runs myself, here are some small tips to help with this along with what the others have said:

• Work Hard only if (1) you are in an ideal mood (2) if your fun bar is high. Once the performance meter is checked, go back to normal even if the work shift isn't over yet, to lessen the stress of your sim.
• Create a work room with emotional objects for doing the Daily Task. Invest in a bathtub/TV to relieve work stress.
• Research on what requirements are needed for ALL career levels. Carl's guide has been helping me in advance for preparing this. For example, if the maximum requirement for Logic skill for a career is up to level 8, even though my current requirements ("Reach level 3 logic skill") are met, I still try to level it up to level 8. By the time you reach around level 6, there's no need to level up skills anymore and you have more time to do the daily tasks (and party ).
• Lastly, other than checking all needs before you go to work, place an emotion object at the edge of the lot or by the front door. Make sure that the last action your sim does before going to work is absorbing this emotion.

[Dellena]

• Lastly, other than checking all needs before you go to work, place an emotion object at the edge of the lot or by the front door. Make sure that the last action your sim does before going to work is absorbing this emotion.

Emotions from being near an emotion object will not stay with the sim after they've left.  Check the Emotion pages in the guild to see what activity will give you the best long lasting buff (i.e. cloudgazing for just a few seconds will give you a 6 hour Inspiration buff). 

[dodi90]

I guess what @imayu94 mean is place a decorative objects that give aura and before going to work, just use interaction on said objects to be in ideal moods. Making said object near the front lawn make it almost no time lose after doing the interaction. Inspired is the only emotion which is too overpowered since even only with base game, you could easily get +8h moodlet from having lvl 3 skill in any instrument that you choose. Of course if you can't time it right since this interaction took random amount of time before giving you inspired, you could always try cloudgazing but sadly this is only for people who buy outdoor retreat.

Other emotions just didn't have that overpowered long lasting buff that last that long unless you utilize another sim as an offering to cowplant daily. This is why she suggested that putting any emotional aura object that CAN be viewed for getting emotion on front lawn as an alternative for quick 4h buff that didn't take much time.

[imayu94]

I did mean it that way, sorry for the confusion. Some items have "View Inspired Work" or other emotional paintings and objects have equivalents. For example, I think element collectibles also have a "Study" option that gives a Focused emotion, so I place that in a temporary outside shelf at the edge of the lot and make sure I use that interaction before leaving for rabbit holes. (I also placed many of them in the hospital, so my doctor is focused all the time)

Since the Outdoor Retreat expansion I have been using the cloudgaze/stargaze interaction to buff the workers, but for the rest of the emotions I have to use objects to observe since they take less time than "Pluck for Inspiration" interactions that take hours.