By
Chris Chilton, on April 1st, 2008%
Develop Magazine have the first interview with new Tiga CEO Richard Wilson up at the moment. In the first part published yesterday he covered tax breaks and international competition. More interesting to us is today’s feature that focuses on skills.
Richard has an interesting point of view as someone from outside the sector – recoginising the ‘classic trade association . . . → Read More: Tiga CEO on Higher Education
By
Chris Chilton, on March 14th, 2008%
My hangover is now receding so it’s a good time, I think, to reflect on last nights awards. There was a lot of positive energy around the event, especially noticable for an industry that is going through a lot at the moment and having to adapt to changing conditions, less commissioning and a lot of competition . . . → Read More: British Animation Awards
By
Chris Chilton, on March 12th, 2008%
Book now! Hurry!
As we’ve said before on this blog this a must attend event for anyone with a vested interest in Higher Education and Games, and will be a key focus for discussions on our own accreditation work.
You can sign up now for the Manchester event on the 29th April:
www.gamesedu.co.uk/register-now-north
Or for the Brighton event (during Develop in . . . → Read More: Games:Edu registration open…
By
Chris Chilton, on February 27th, 2008%
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 . . . → Read More: Games Grads and Games:Edu
By
Chris Chilton, on February 19th, 2008%
Great news for students today as Microsoft announced a raft of free development software is now available to download free of charge as part of a program called DreamSpark.
The pack includes XNA Game Studio, Visual Studio and Windows Server software meaning that students can now get there grubby mitts on some top quality tools and (in . . . → Read More: Dreamspark – free Microsoft tools for students
By
Chris Chilton, on February 8th, 2008%
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.
Continue reading Graduates and Careers in Games
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