I was wondering if anyone has insight into working on mobile vs. console games as a Technical Artist? I’ve worked at mobile games companies but I wouldn’t want to pigeon-hole myself, I’m definitely interested in working in console. Any thoughts?
Much appreciated, thanks! 
I worked primarily on hand-held and mobile projects before transitioning into studios with a stronger focus on console/pc. I was definitely hammered on my lack of console/pc development experience during interviews, but ultimately I felt that I was judged mostly on my skill-set and development comprehension. My recommendations from personal experience:
Keep improving your coding skills. Work on gaining an understanding of intermediate-advanced programming concepts. For me, I’ve focused mostly on Python. The stronger your programming skills, the better equipped you are to both solve complex problems and discuss them.
Maintain a functional comprehension of how art content of the varying types is created and put into a game. E.G. Even if you don’t intend to be a rigging and animation focused tech artist, make sure you know the basics. Chances are, even if you aren’t building rigs or animation tools, you’ll be fixing problems related to that type of content or building tools that in some way curate/interact with that content.
Tech-art is largely about making sure artists work faster, happier, and without interruption. The buzz-word here being, ‘force-multiplier’. It may go without saying, but this means you want to keep an eye and an ear out at all times for opportunities to save production time: reduce the number of steps, mitigate maintenance costs, automate repetition, etc. This is where you get to think big, get creative, and find better ways to accomplish goals across the team. More to your question, though, this is where some of your best resume/portfolio pieces will come from. Everyone in game development understands the value of saving time and frustration - show a room of interviewers a tool suite that removed 14 of 15 steps from the artist’s shoulders and nobody will care that it was built on a mobile project.
As far as possible, within the confines of your employer’s policy(and arguably even outside those confines), try to keep a record of all the tools you build. If you are able to show a range of tools, even in just a photo-collage of UI screen-caps, it can go a long way for showing your problem-solving experience, plus it makes for a great interview conversation piece.
Familiarize yourself with concepts used in next-gen console/pc development. You may not have had the production opportunity do things like write shaders, work with PBR materials, or play with newer tools like those from Substance, but make sure you have some familiarity with them and bonus points if can demonstrate that familiarity during an interview or in your portfolio. You don’t necessarily have to have first-hand production experience, but try not to be in the dark.
Customer-service skills. Work on communicating problems and solutions clearly to non-technical people. Friendliness, clarity of speech, being able to scale the complexity of explanations. Be able to understand what an artist is trying to express and be sympathetic to their complaints as far as possible. A lot of your job is about talking with people, sometimes training them, sometimes telling them why you can’t give them what they want. Those people-skills are platform-independent.
Some side notes. Earlier in my career I was aggressively aiming to work at a high-end, next-gen, console/pc studio. Having achieved that goal, I can say from experience that not all studios are created equal and the same goes for tech-art jobs; just being able to work on a fancy project doesn’t mean you’ll be happy, or that you’ll be advancing your career or on-the-job skill-set. You can just as easily get pigeon-holed at a AAA-studio as you can at a mobile/handheld studio, so try to ask the right questions about the nature of the tech-art role you are investigating.
I hope this helps some and good luck in landing the role you want!
Amazing advice, bryceclark, this helps a lot! Thanks for writing it all out. I’m glad it’s not completely about knowing this and that technology, but doing all you can to make sure artists can work as efficiently as possible, using whichever tools to accomplish this… Great big-picture answer.