Official news on the launch of this years Games Grads career fair and this years (double!) helping of Games:Edu. We’re supporting both and I think that it shows a great willingness on the parts of industry and education to work together.

Keith Stuart at the Guardian has summed this up:

Clearly the ties between the higher education community and the games industry have strengthened since I used to write the annual ‘how to get a job in the games industry’ booklet for Edge magazine. Back then we struggled to include a handful of videogame-specific courses – now a majority of establishments run some kind of programming or design strand aimed at students wanting a career in the games industry. At that time, the industry could be a little dismissive of dedicated games programming courses – loads of developers were telling me they’d prefer staff with a strong pure maths or physics background. It seems though, that the two fields are now working together to produce the next generation of UK talent.

This is a good point – the real success of courses is often defined by how well they have integrated core skills with games specific techniques.

The attendees at Games:Edu will be working towards defining and recognising courses where these core skills can be enhanced by the game creation process, leading to well rounded graduates with underlying principle skills that they can apply in the games industry.

Importantly Skillset are seeing more collaborations occur at our accredited courses where lecturers work on the academic skills of students and industry provides practitioners to work on specific game projects, giving students the best of both worlds.