Skillset Blog

Looking for a job? Think you’d be interested in working at Skillset and helping to shape the future of skills development in the UK?

Then this might be of interest… 

Permanent Contract
Based in London (King’s Cross)
Salary: c. £22,000pa, plus benefits

We are looking for an Interactive Media, Computer Games and Animation Administrator to provide first class administrative and secretarial support to the team (namely two of the Skillset bloggers Chris (me) and Fiona.)

To download the full job description, person specification and application form, please head over to the main website: www.skillset.org/skillset/jobs

A quick pointer to an interesting piece on Gamasutra today - the 10 Myths About Game Degrees. Dr Andrew Tuson from City University has set out to debunk some of the popularly held views on games degrees, and has some good insights in the main.

However - his argument seems to me to fall down because it misses a key point - the main reason these ‘myths’ are innacurate is because they assign a value or trait to ‘games degrees’ and I think this article also argues back, without acknowledging the most important point in the debate about the modern games degree and that is, that they are not all the same.

It’s a fallacy (or a myth!) to talk about ’games degrees’ as a unified section of higher education. UCAS is currently listing nearly 300 courses. Skillset accredits 4. I’m confident that all 10 of these ‘myths’ are exactly that where our network is concerned - graduates of these courses have a better than even chance of getting work, industry values them, students value them, and the institutions invest heavily in maintaining their reputations.

Am I confident of saying that about every new degree program in the UK?

Not really, and employers certainly aren’t - which is what gives rise to these ‘myths’ in the first place. No smoke without fire, I believe is the saying.

The Ten Myths of Games Degrees:

1. Game degrees are easy – students play games all day!
2. There are few jobs in the game industry.
3. Game companies prefer graduates from ‘traditional’ disciplines…
4. …and no one else will want to employ games graduates!
5. All you’ll do is testing.
6. You can learn on the job, no degree required.
7. Your job will be outsourced to India, China, or (insert country of current economic paranoia here).
8. Game programming degrees are more valued than game design degrees (or vice-versa).
9. Game programming degrees produce hackers and nerds.
10. Universities are only in it for the money!

I certainly do think however that there are more courses out there that do not fall victim to any of these statements - if anyone’s interested in proving it why not fill in an application form!

www.skillset.org/games/accreditation/apply

Well - invitations are on their way. 1st of July is the date, and if you are an employer on the look out for talented artists and animators then this is definitely the event for you.

Didn’t get an invite?

Head over to www.skillset.org/animation/showcase to register.

Registration is for employers only as the graduates are carefully selected from our range of animation and games courses - it’s not an open event.

See you there!

Sir Bob Geldof
Originally uploaded by
NESTA: Making Innovation Flourish

Tuesday saw the largest innovation event ever held in the UK descend on the Festival Hall. The Skillset Blog team was there (en masse) to sample proceedings. Despite a slow down in the afternoon, where the ‘expert’ seminars largely left me a bit dissapointed there were some interesting talking points brought up by a range of great speakers.

A lot of the focus seemed to me to be on positioning the UK in competition with the rest of the world over innovation. In some ways this is true, we certainly can’t afford to be left behind (or left out) however the focus of the keynotes was on collaboration above all which is slightly at odds with the idea of competition over innovation.

Tim Berners-Lee, whose ‘vague but exciting’ internet sums this up better than most, is a great example. Whilst a few jokes were spun at the expense of the fact that the web is free and available to all rather than raking in millions for UK plc, it is the fact that collaboration is ‘why I built the web…’.

Read the rest of this post »

There’s nothing like e-books to get a publishing debate going.

For those not in the know, e-books were hailed in the last millenium as the future of digital publishing… and yet this “revolution” never materialised. Why? For several reasons. From the lack of a satisfactory device with which to read them, to functionality that didn’t wholly fulfill reader demands.

The buzz has been growing online - and in print - around e-books again. Sara Lloyd, Head of Digital Publishing at Pan Macmillan, recently posted an article on The Digitalist (in several parts) that she has written for the US journal Library Trends. In it she provides an articulate description and analysis of how publishers got to where they are now and what they should be thinking about doing for the future, with e-books as one part of a digital future.

I urge you to read this. It gathers together a whole heap of thoughts from conferences, the press and blogosphere on what the digital present and future might look like for publishers. Titled “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century” it provides a summary for the specialist and non-specialist alike.

But how do we seize this opportunity, react as an industry and make it happen? Do we have the right skills in place to do this? Perhaps not. Sara mentions the role of Google and Amazon in the revolution. Here are - shock, horror - non-publishing companies that have the resources, technologies, market knowledge and skills base to seek out these opportunities and find a way to make it happen. They don’t respect any industry-imposed boundaries of who does what.

How can book publishers respond? Get skilled up - and fast. Develop a skills manifesto to match the publisher’s manifesto. Ensure publishers have the strategic and technical skills required to track, understand, and respond to the changing markets - whether working in-house or with external partners - to deliver digital books or content any way a customer wants.

If you are reading this whilst nodding sagely at the mention of skills, why don’t you join one of our publishing focus groups in June? We’re organising a range of groups to cover the different the different sectors. Contact me to find out more about the who, what, where and when: suzannea@skillset.org.

All going swimmingly by all accounts, around 50 students through the doors and through the first round of pitching. We’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback from the students with all but one indicating they enjoyed the day!

The main learning takeaways for students seem to be that they recognise the need to always have your audience in mind when developing ideas, that they also recognise the importance of taking on board feedback and suggestions to improve their ideas (not ruin them!) and interestingly the realisation for some that the way you present your work can have just as much effect as how good it is when presenting to a commissioner.

It sounds like its been a great couple of days with much learnt all round.

Roll on Round Two!

At last week’s Periodical Publishers Association Magazines 2008 conference, the revered/reviled (delete as appropriate) former Blair spin-doctor, Derek Draper, took part in a session named “The Personality of the Perfect Editor: What Can Psychology Tell Us?”

He took the delegates through a psychometric profiling test (supplied courtesy of Psychologies Magazine) and much fun was had by all, as we sent our answers through to a real-time SMS server, which showed the live results during the session (it’s not often you are instructed to keep your mobiles ON during a conference).

Adapted from Daniel Nettle’s book, Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, the test identifies a “Big Five” of personality dimensions:

1. Extroversion (”Wanderers”) - ambitious and motivated by recognition and acclaim, enjoy a level of unpredictability in life and work
2. Neuroticism (”Worriers”) - pay attention to detail, work hard and spot potential problems, which keeps you awake at night, but makes you driven and likely to be successful
3. Conscientiousness (”Controllers”) - efficient, organised, consistent and successful, you like a structured environment but don’t respond so well to change
4. Agreeableness (”Empathisers”) - thrive in the caring professions, but may sideline yourself in supporting others
5. Openness (”Poets”) - successful in the creative industries as you think - and use - language in a different way, but could be seen to have strange or irrational beliefs.

Most people demonstrate a tendency towards one or two of these dimensions. But what did our group of magazine editors score high on? Well, there were a lot of “Controllers”, “Wanderers” and “Worriers”. The general consensus was that as an editor, you are the one that has to maintain the quality and vision for the publication, but have to influence, and depend on, a team of staff to help deliver that vision on time and in profit.

There were some inherent contradictions in some of the findings: can you really like an unpredictable work life, but prefer to be in a structured environment? One thing was clear from the session: being an editor is a tough, challenging and lonely job, where you need a multitude of skills to be effective. However, the reward of a successful magazine with a great team of staff running it, makes it all worthwhile.

Derek is a BT MIND journalist of the year. You can find more advice on his website  

Between education and industry, obviously. Nick was speaking to a mixed audience of industry practitioners, lecturers and students at Games:Edu and gave out some pretty good advice for brokering relationships between education and industry.

Nick (and Rare) is keen to see more people doing it, ‘evangelising’ about games, engaging with academics and students.

Two sections then, first up, advice for developers thinking about talking to universities:

+ if asked for content advice make sure you think about the whole industry and not just your own company
+ graduates are not just cheap labour
+ don’t just focus on the top five - cast your net wide and you may get lucky
+ helping courses develop may pay off further down the line with top quality staff and ideas fed into your studio
+ avoid hard sell lectures students are interested in proper lectures on proper subjects - this will attract far more interest that a talk on how wonderful your working environment it
+ tell the truth to students (about crunch etc) new employees finding this out the hard way may leave your studio
+ it is hard for one studio to visit every courses - so collaboration is going to be necessary
+ academics don’t bite!

And some advice for academics:

+ some developers will try and treat you like an assembly line
question all the advice your given and look for the core patterns in all the contact you have with multiple developers
+ don’t try to fill a single developer’s needs - core skills are forever and will serve the students better than specific skills with specific tools
+ students should cast their net wide and look for as many opportunities as possible.
+ developers don’t bite! - but you need to consider things from their perspective and understand the pressures created by working in the games business

I think if everyone follows these nuggets, we’ll be halfway to sorting out this whole issue, and will have more games courses working in partnership with the games industry, and focusing us all on what is needed to keep pushing the industry forward.

I’ve been to Manchester (didn’t stay for the football though) for Games:Edu and was intending to post live from the event, unfortunately, an unscrupulous wireless provider was unwilling to part with a connection for less that £350.

However - here are my thoughts on (must stress) Matt’s own thoughts which are not in any way representative of either Evolution or SCEE.

Matt’s morning session raised an interesting point, in highlighting attitudes towards games courses in industry alongside some of the more rabid musings of the mainstream press. In identifying the classic entertainment cycle (experienced by books, films, rock and roll and TV) of formation, damnation, acceptance and celebration.

Looking at this, and games themselves seem to be hovering in between damnation and acceptance, it strikes me that the games industry itself is guilty of applying this cycle to games courses.

Read the rest of this post »

Suzanne Ashley, Skillset’s brand new Publishing Sector Manager, and the newest author on the Skillset blog.

Suzanne will be keeping us informed and intrigued by goings on in the publishing sector and you can keep track of Suzanne’s posts, or follow the brand new publishing category to keep up to date.