Degrees and Jobs

Looking back at many years in education, as student (Glasgow, St Andrews and Edinburgh universities), educator (West of Scotland, Paisley, Newport Wales, Bolton and Abertay) and father of students (Caledonian, Glasgow, Salford, Dundee and Abertay) I'd like to put down some reflections on the non-apparent linkage betwen a university degree and a job.

I suppose the place to start is with the games degrees.  Its a simple fact, not a boast, that I designed and rolled out the first named games degrees worldwide.  this is not to say that I was the first to take games seriously in acadaemia (David Seal at Bolton at least beat me to that distinction.)  But, if there ever was a degree designed to put people into jobs, its a games-named degree.

One of the problems is that the timescales of degrees don't match those of the employers.  It takes years to think of a new degree idea, to research it, to bounce it around industry, to reflect upon it, to decide whether to keep thinking or not.  Once you decide to 'go' i has to end up in a prospectus (published 1.5 years in advance of the new student entry date), and then it takes up to four years to get a graduate out.  How long is that?  Around 5-10 years in my estimation.  Then the degree has to run for another 5-10 years to be worthwhile.  Academics need to be trained and retrained, etc.

Against this the industry keeps changing.  Games consoles rise and fall.  Some of this is predictable, some not.  So, we can see the PS3 being thought about, mooted, hyped, games prepared for it, in secrecy, markets prepared before it arrives to a huge tada!  Or, the Wii hits the market and people just luuuuuurve it.  nobody, least of all Nintendo, expected that, so the market tilts to one side, stocks are unavailable, coders don't exist, dev kits are in short supply, this tanker takes quite a bit to turn.

Industry and acadaemia need to meet at the point of graduation.  The end-of-course ex-students need to find themselves in a place where employers welcome them in and find the useful.  This just aint happening enough in the games industry.  Lots'n'lots o graduates, few find employment, many posts are unfilled.

Of course, sitting on my side of the fence chucking stones over at the other side, the industry has much to take responsibility for.  This aint new.  Back in the '70's the Engineering Industry Training Board put a levy on non-training companies which went to training companies.  I'm not suggesting we do this, but that we recognise that the industry also has responsibilities to train new staff and to help the trainers of new staff.

That the industry does no more than pay scant attention to the training of new staff is obvious.  Few university games degree courses are ever visited by or input to by games employers, whether they are geographically local or global players.  The unis are left to use scant resources to create bricks without straw.

Quite simply there is too little resource in the system.  There are places making a decent fist of it.  But these are not obvious.  I attended a meeting where Skillset turned up to accredit a degree (to save my job I will only add: not my employer.)  The package of documentation was put together by management.  The academic staff knew nothing of what was going on until the meeting was called.  We turned up.  Skillset smiled at us and asked some obvious questions.  Management were present and the atmosphere was one of stick to the party line.  Despite clear and obvious failings in the degree programme Skillset gave it the OK.  I had the feeling they were going to do this anyhoo.

So, if Skillset is not a clear indication of the quality of a degree programme, then what is?  The only clear indication of the quality of a graduate into a hands-on industry such as video games development is a portfolio of work to show employers.  Indeed, pre-Skillset this was the way it was generally done.  A student brought along his work and showed it to the employer who decided on whether this was worthy of the kind of person they wanted to employ.

This is an easy one for employers, so I suggest they take this one and still run with it.  Little shows a student's worth than his work.  Grades are infamously flakey in the grand scheme of things, for a wide variety of reasons (yes, one is fraud, but that is the least of the problems with grading student work.)

For universities the creation of student portfolios is a challenge.  Unis are intensely beaurocratic organisations.  Layers and layers of management and admin jonnies create work for themselves by creating procedures and forms.  The nett result is that a straightjacket is created where passing or failing is the be-all and end-all.  But, what does 'he got 56% in Advanced Mathematical Modelling' mean?  Very little, to the employer.

The student, and the academic, must create what is a parallel instruction stream where the student spends his time at university creating useful work.  By 'time at uni' I mean all the years he spends between entering and leaving: holidays, weekends, etc.  During this time he must build his work, save it, comment upon it and keep it employer-facing using such as Bebo, wikis, blogs, etc.

Perhaps one day we will get the active and the recording part of acadaemia back together.  But, for now, we need to make sure that students spend their time creating useful objects - useful to them and to employers if not to admin jonnies - that show their work.

How do and should they go about this?  I'll leave that to another blog as my wife ha got up and is frowning at me for working on my hols at 8.45am.  And, the sun will shine today, my eldest and his wife are up from Manchester.  We'll take them across on the ferry to Dunoon as this gives a great view of the Firth of Clyde - mountains, sea-lochs, seaside settlements, blue skies, etc.

So - keep studying, keep working, keep enjoying life.

John S.

jnsak.wikispaces.com