It would be nice if there was suitable jobs out there in the first place, what with all the studio closures over the last 2 years...

There are plenty of quality games developers out there who are currently unemployed. There may be lower skilled IT professionals gaining education, but that is just representative of the numbers of jobs out there.

Why train in IT if you can't get a job doing it? Games Development or otherwise.

I've had a bad few weeks, so I'm pretty negative in my thinking on most things at the moment so apologies in advance.

I must say, to chime in with that, that the standard of game development education is pretty appalling. Most game courses focus on teaching functional software skills, such as Unreal 3, C++ and 3ds max, but do not do a good job of teaching them to be game makers.

Functional skill requirements in the industry change all the time (very few game courses are teaching AS3 for example, despite it being critical to social game development) so the value of that learning is generally shallow. Whereas teaching developers to think like game designers, have a grasp of game theory and history, understand the publishing business, how to found a game startup, how to work in a commercial development teams and so on to broaden their minds is what makes them a developer for life.

Having worked both sides of the education/industry divide, I can appreciate the challenges facing us to get the UK back to number one. One off-the-wall idea I had was to offer four year courses that operated just like a development team, and would actually produce commercial titles throughout the year. Imagine 20-30 students, each one specialising and switching roles as they churn out game after game, using everything from C++ to Java, using every modern development tool and learning the process by doing it for real. Instead of one over-worked underpaid lecturer trying to feed the five thousand, each course is armed with a squad of top developers who know the business of making games inside out. Graduates from the course could even be employed to over-see the next course too, creating a self-sustaining talent pool. Who knows, the course could even pay for itself if the games do well ;)

I teach as part of a very dedicated team of lecturers on a wide portfolio of Games Courses - we've spent a lot of time talking to industry and employers on working out what should go into our courses - and we've courses covering both the wider aspects you'd expect to see in Games Design Courses (3D, Animation, Game Design, Group Projects, Programming) to more niche avenues of study like Audio, Mulitplayer and Gameplay Design Scripting.

None of our Courses are Skillset accredited because Skillset, at the time of writing, don't recognise Games Design Courses, only art and programming courses but the list of successful graduates we place in industry every year in game design poistion, as well as everything else, would suggest we're doing something right.

Don't tar us all with the same brush, some of us are working very hard to support the learning of our students, with industry ready skills, along with large scale group projects along the lines of what other commentators are suggesting - we just don't get the recognition we sometimes feel we deserve.

I run a Games Art course at Escape Studios in London and I work very hard to make sure that the course is relevant in content and has had industry input

There are very good courses out there as well as some courses that are too broad and lack focus, we often get students at Escape who have completed a games degree and simply don’t have the skills needed to enter the industry

It’s important that prospective students choose a course with care and make sure that they get good tutors and an up to date curriculum

Wake up politicians... do you remember 1992 when the UK had some of the best developers and publishers in the world.
Do you remember when you berated us all as young timewasters?
Do you remember when you failed to support our publishers and forced them to sell out to competition overseas?
Do you remember when you forced us to employ everyone in the company including those who were only needed on a project by project basis?
Do you remember when you set up all these university courses without consulting enough people at the hard edge of actually developing and publishing these games?
Do you understand how arrogant and naive it has been of you to think that a you can treat our highly specific, always shifting, creative and technically skilled industry like car manufacturing or database programing?
Do you think we don't realise that you only started to pay attention when someone distorted the figures so much taht apparently the industry is outgrossing hollywood?
How can you say you are horrified at what David Braben said when he has been saying hte same thing for at least 10 years, him and many others like him.
Until our governmnet learns to respond more quickly to external changes (like technological advancement and the tax policies of other countries) and spend less time trying to force it's own target driven issues down our throats (like education, education education) we will not get anywhere.
I am in total agreement with Lee Bamber, the only way to teach anyone how to make games is for them to work on a full project through the entire development cycle. For young developers they learn more at the end of a prohect than they do at the start, but they can only apply this knowlwdge to the next project they work on.
I would advocate a system where half of the time each year is spent in small teams of 3-4 people making a complete product on one of the samll platforms, flash, iPhone, DSiWare that has the potenttial to actually be published by a unified university publishing house. By the end of a 3 year course each pupil will have gone through 3 entire development cycles (hopefully with minimal use of unproffessional third party middleware) and will have learned to appreciate the reality of real game development, working with a team and appreciating all roles within the team (which is often lacking) and most important of all learning how to finish (which is very often lacking). By the end of such a course those who stay until the end will be of much more experience and use to the industry and those who couldn't make it to the end will have been weeded out early as wannabe's without the latent skill or determination to actually be of any use to anyone.

Hmmm "Proffessional" very professional

I think Jon has pretty much summed it up.....they would not listen then and are still faffing now...and they wonder why more people play games than actually vote....?

It is much easier to get elected by talking about education rather than talking about tax cuts for an industry - something that many people don't understand and which some people actually despise.

Politicans are not interested in solving problems, they are interested in gaining power and holding onto it for as long as possible. Although they all claim to have gotten into politics to "help people"... the irony.

Personally, I do not expect anything from them and would advise my fellow developers to not invest too much emotion into whether we get tax breaks or not.

The only way for the industry to get what it needs to remain competitive is too prepare its argument in such a way that any normal person without knowledge of the games industry would still agree with the argument put forward. Currently, our current argument does not do that.

Can anyone guess the title of the last book I read?

I study at Abertay, the supposed centre of excellence for this sort of thing. Thats all smoke and mirrors and I can confirm that the quality of education here is abysmal, understaffed and does not meet the standards needed for us students to go out and work for companies. Please call in unannounced so they cant prepare a tour of spin and deceit for you.

There are plenty of good grads with computer science, maths, software engineering etc who are being cast aside because they dont have specialist skills.

The industry should be taking on these people and getting them to learn the craft in house, instead of waiting for educators to create a conveyor belt of perfect gaming grads for them.

Considering it is such a small industry, expecting people to specialise at degree level with no real guarantee of work seems a bit harsh... im not sure what use a gaming degree will be if they dont land their dream job.

I'm studying games programming on a skillset accredited course at a different uni to the previous student.

I'm very satisfied with the course, so were the companies I interviewed with and I recently secured a years placement in industry. So there are some good courses out there.

However I do feel that many of the students on my course aren't up to it and are unsuitable for industry; I think this shows two things: using games as an incentive for education isn't always a good idea and that the quality or importance of subjects such as maths, physics and computing isn't high enough at school or college. I also believe this would make group/team projects as suggested above a great struggle.
Having said that I'd never studied computing till I got to uni! Just learnt a bit in my spare time.