Skillset Blog

OK - a lot of recent headlines to sort through at the moment, and definitely worth taking the time to pick through some of the seemingly conflicting headlines being generated by the games industry this week on the subject of graduate recruitment.

First up - Matthew Jeffery from EA who talks to gamesindustry.biz about graduate recruitment from EA’s point of view. Highlighting the recent surge in numbers of games courses in the UK, Matthew advises that EA:

prefer people to have traditional degrees, so somebody studying computer science, maths or physics and then coming into a programming role, means that they can then go off into a number of different industries and be successful.

Whilst this isn’t a universal approach across the games industry he also notes that EA do not hire from generalist game degree courses, and that graduates need to have specialised skills in programming or art, and voices a general concern about Games Design as an academic subject. These views are similar to other employers, with many needing highly developed academic skills alongside practical coding and art abilities in their graduates.

Matthew offers some pretty sound advice that we wholeheartedly endorse here at Skillset:

People all want to get into our industry, which is a phenomenal thing, but for graduates we just want to make sure that the message is out there - choose carefully, look at the course you’re studying, see where the students have gone on to after that, etc.

 From our regular tours of HE institutions with Skillset it does seem that students do less research on their courses than you might think and that a bit of digging on the internet would reveal which are valued by industry (and which are not.)

It seems that games companies are very involved in education in many ways - Rare for example regularly engage with games courses in order to help nurture and deliver the right style of graduates for their needs.

Nick Burton, one of their senior developers, has written a great piece for gamasutra on how they go about this. He’s supremely positive about the relationship between HE and industry and really understands the benefits of getting involved early in the careers of new developers, he says:

If our industry is to grow and remain at the forefront of creativity, we must help the educators in their work, nurturing new talent and ensuring they have a steady input of students to teach.

I obviously agree with this - its vital that employers have input into HE courses (note that I mean input, and not total control!) as this will help to avoid the situation that EA are concerned about, with hopeful students attending courses that know little or nothing about what they will be expected to do in their first role at a games company.

Finally - it’s worth pointing out another piece of news (thanks Toby) is that Blitz have picked up a start up based at the University of Teesside. Apparently

the developer, set up by two Teeside University graduates three years ago, was born out of the frustrations of the founders when they failed to get jobs in the industry due to lack of experience.

So - the moral (or morals) of this whole story? Employers need to engage in a positive way, making their needs clear and supporting the delivery of appropriate courses to appropriate candidates. Lecturers and tutors need to be responsive to the needs of industry and to invest time and expertise in preparing the right type of courses. Students need to do their research before picking a course - it’s their career after all. Finally, if all else fails, go it alone, and start a new company!

Of course, Skillset and our colleagues in industry and education are working on solutions to these issues, and here is as good a place as any to highlight our industry endorsed games courses at Abertay, Paisley and Glamorgan, and to encourage anyone thinking about this area to get involved in this scheme by applying or offering support.

It’s also worth saying that this is a debate that will run for a while, not least at the Skillset supported event Games:Edu so if you have an opinion on the above and want to air it, then make sure you are there!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Games, Skillset. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.