Chief Executive of Ukie, the trade body for the UK video game and interactive entertainment industry.
An excellent meeting with Anna Mansi and Sara Whybrew today has prompted me to return to the topic of how we can best work together across the video games industry to develop a long-term approach to meeting our skills and workforce needs. As I've mentioned before, I know it is difficult to talk about long-range workforce planning when the industry is going through painful layoffs. In some senses, though, I think it is essential - the better the industry is at developing our own long-term talent pipeline, the stronger our ability to attract the inward investment and growth support that will drive our future sustainability. 'Skills' is one of those words that everyone says, assuming that everyone else has the same definition as they do. Unfortunately, I've discovered over the years that in a room of 4 people, it is possible to have 6 different definitions of what the 'skills' agenda actually covers. I'll dodge the definitions issue here, but in essence I think that every industry - and perhaps Creative Industries more than most - depends fundamentally on the people who work in it and how empowered they feel to do their best work. You can have a great talent supply-chain, but if those people fetch up in insecure jobs that don't provide opportunities to learn and grow, they won't stick around. As one colleague once said to me "people join organisations (and sometimes industries) but they leave managers". Creating an industry that has access to great people and gives them great opportunities needs long-term structural engineering not short-term fixes. Tempting though it is to reach for quick-fixes or solutions that have worked in other contexts, in my experience there is no real substitute for going through the long (sometimes decades-long) process of engineering a genuine talent supply-chain that connects industry need with aspirational jobs. Video games is a young industry, and we haven't yet had time to come together around the common definitions of job roles, skills frameworks and professional development that are the absolute bedrock of industries that have addressed their skills needs on a sustainable basis. Take Apprenticeships, for example. One common refrain I have heard in the industry is that Apprenticeships 'don't work for video games businesses'. But we have spent relatively little time asking 'why not?'. Given that Apprenticeships are an established part of how successive Governments seek to bridge demand and supply, what is it about our industry that means the model doesn't seem to be working (and given that the model is unlikely to change, even with more flexibility) can we adapt to meet it halfway? The temptation is to reach for solutions - and we are definitely going to need to build scalable functions, skills standards and career pathways - but before we start providing the answers, I think we may need to go through a process of figuring out what the questions really are.
You should chat to Marcia Deakin from NextGen Skills Academy who have been working with games apprenticeships for the last 10 years and join their roundtable at the GamesIndustry.Biz HR summit on the subject. They are our industry leaders in this any many other skills areas
Love that you’re asking ‘why not?’ The wonderful team here at IfATE love apprenticeships and technical education and we will happily support your quest however we can.
I look forward to continued discussions Nick…
To add to this - we’ve got 30+ studios taking up Skills Bootcamp funding in the last 18 months, so there is a model for how games and skills and government funding can work. Along with Declan Cassidy and Marcia Deakin and the skills collective we love this topic!
Our thoughts exactly, we're opening doors Nick.
Well said Nick Great to meet with you today.
Excellent insights from Nick.
Creating equitable pathways into games 🎮
2moI wrote a 2021 report on games industry apprenticeships thats worth a look - https://intogames.org/news/into-games-releases-the-uk-games-apprenticeship-2021/