New work experience program to aid local academic institutions
British development powerhouse Lionhead will next week launch a work experience programme for local students, the studio has announced.
The Guildford group said it wants to help the British development sector link closer with academia, and inspire young people to build games for a living.
Students from local schools can undertake work experience on-site and will be able to try out “all of the six main disciplines of making a game”.
Each student will have a personal mentor to work with, Lionhead said.
“The video games industry offers a huge variety of career opportunities, but it is very intense and hectic,” said Lionhead producer Jemma Harris.
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“It has been challenging to understand how we could offer a really worthwhile experience to young people in a busy fast-paced working environment. Staff here have worked closely with teachers at Woking Sixth Form College to come up with a program which will showcase the diversity, creativity and excitement of games development,” she added.
“We hope that we will encourage talented students to seriously consider the games industry as a career option.”
Lionhead’s partnership with local academic institutions is a key guiding principle of the Livingstone-Hope Review, a government-backed report on how games education can improve.
Of the twenty recommendations in the Skills Review [found here], one asks studios to “use video games at school to draw greater numbers of young people into STEM and computer science”.
Another says game developers should “raise awareness of the video games and visual effects industries in the eyes of STEM and arts graduates.”
Lionhead said it would work closely with local schools and colleges to ensure an influx of students come through.
From my experience (trying to get a games industry job) there are too many people wanting to have a career in games, not too few. Why not have more internships to get thousands of graduates the experience that is asked of them whenever they apply for a job? Asking more people to learn will just make it 10000 people you have to disappoint with a rejection email, it wont create new jobs for them.
The issue isn't that there aren't enough jobs, or that there are too many people. It's more to do with the fact that the graduates aren't good enough for the jobs. There are always jobs if you are good enough. How many graduate artists have fanart in their portfolios? A DeviantArt account with tracing? Programmers without demos or team experience? Designers who haven't worked on any mods? I could go on. Be proactive, network, get a job.
Fantastic news! Any efforts made by UK developers to partner with schools/colleges/uni's need to be applauded. Well Done Lionhead! We need to encourage more kids to consider games a career choice - as early as possible.
Anything that gets young people thinking outside the prescriptive box of the national curriculum is surely a good thing? When I was growing up I would have loved the opportunity to do something like this. Plus its great to see a big games company aware of its position within the community and offer a hand.
Despite what commenters say, this isn't (or shouldn't be) about recruitment. It's about enthusing school children with Maths and Science, the harder theoretical pair, and Engineering and Technology, the practical applications. As a former Special Needs Teacher specialising in Maths and Physics I'd like to see far more initiatives like this, over the whole country, not just where are clusters!
I don't suppose Lionhead is benefitting financially from this are they? This article implies this is a charitable initiative to improve the future standard of the UK games industry. In reality I wonder if this is simply another way to exploit the unrealistic desire of many young people to have a career in this field.
Surely their efforts would be better spent advising these kids that a growing number of their peers are wanting to pursue this avenue, and that focusing too much on acquiring game development skills could leave them with very limited job prospects.
