[game_edu] Placement problems

[Ian Schreiber]

Given how competitive the game industry can be even in the best of times (it is a glamour industry, after all), I've never made ANY promises to students about getting a job there - in fact I tell them to have a "plan B". And right now it's not even the best of times; studios are closing left and right, the whole industry is in a transitional period, overall it is just not a good time to be looking for work, even for experienced devs. Meanwhile, our schools keep pumping out the same number of graduates every year, regardless of industry demand. So, no, I don't think there's a simple solution here. Even if you personally discovered some magic formula that made your students all high-demand, that would just mean that other schools in your position would have an even harder time because your students would be hogging all of their slots :)

Obviously you can do everything possible to help your students find jobs. Try to figure out if you're having more trouble with the "it's what you know" or "it's who you know" side of the equation. In the game industry, that means making sure they've got solid skills, ability to work well in an interdisciplinary team, and ability to present themselves so that their resume and cover letter don't get auto-filtered; and then make sure they network, attend local game dev meetings but also larger conferences like GDC (on that note, if you have truly excellent student work to show, have you considered getting a booth at GDC in order to promote your students as good hires to the industry? If you're heading to GDC this year, I'd encourage you to take a walk around the expo hall and career area at some point, and just see the difference between the school booths that are primarily recruiting students, those that are recruiting faculty, and those that are just
 there to get industry visibility for their current students).

You can also encourage students to start their own studios, which is a more viable path now than it used to be given the relatively low bar to entry for mobile games and some other areas. I don't know if that counts as getting "hired" if they hire themselves, but you can certainly work to establish a startup incubator in your area (or if there already is one, establish or strengthen a pipeline to get your student teams to go into there). This would probably also mean additional coursework in entrepreneur-type business topics, and an overall culture that fosters this kind of mentality - didn't someone from USC give a talk at the Edu Summit at GDC just this last year or two about how they basically only hired professors who had started their own studios in the past, and how that and some other things translated into an entrepreneurship culture? And hey, if you've got a decent number of indie studios local, I certainly hope you're taking advantage of that
 resource, bringing in some of those people as guest speakers to talk about how and why they went indie.

Also, I suppose the other option is just to reduce the slots in your program and be more selective in who you let in, if that's possible for your school. If the industry only has enough open slots to hire ten of your students each year, then you shouldn't be letting twenty into your program. Yeah, I know, that's not an option, your Dean will break your kneecaps just for suggesting "fewer butts in seats" as a solution to anything, I'll shut up now.

- Ian




________________________________
 From: Peter Border <pborder at msbcollege.edu>
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv <game_edu at igda.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, March 6, 2013 10:41 AM
Subject: Re: [game_edu] Placement problems
 
Hello game educators:

I have a topic I would like to open up a discussion on: placement. Frankly this is my biggest worry. I teach at a career college
in Minnesota, far from both coasts, and there just is not a whole lot of game industry going on here. We do have a large
QA facility for Activision and I push that heavily on my students. We have been blessed (there is no other word) with a very active IGDA
chapter which I also push heavily. But aside from those two, it's all small shops and the local indie game designers. They all do great stuff but
there just isn't a lot of hiring that happens at a 3-person shop. 

Career colleges have some advantages over regular colleges- they move MUCH faster, for instance. However the emphasis is completely on
getting people into jobs and if your program doesn't do that it will be cancelled. So I have to get people into the game industry or else.
Luckily, my program is basically about teaching people to be game programmers rather than artists, with skills that transfer into many high
demand areas like databases or web applications, so it's certainly not hopeless. Still, it would be nice to place more students into game 
industry jobs than we have been.

Is anyone else out there in a similar state? Does anyone have any hints? Maybe I'm missing something, but I think there are a lot of 
programs hitting this same wall. Game design is pretty sexy and recruitment is easy, but the other end of the pipeline can be a problem.

Happy equinox!

Peter Border
Game and Application Design Chairman
Globe University/Minnesota School of Business
1401 West 76th St
Richfield, MN 55423
pborder at msbcollege.edu

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