A new approach to the skills shortage is needed | Opinion

20.04.2024 - 07:48 / gamesindustry.biz

The idea of an industry-led body with a mandate to come up with solutions to skills shortages in the UK, as presented in this week's Skillfull report, is self-evidently a good one.

Difficulties in finding staff with the specific, high-level skillsets involved in game development have dogged the industry for decades, and while there have been quite a few industry initiatives aimed at improving the situation over the years, the underlying problems remain frustratingly intractable.

A body designed to work on these issues with the full backing of a wide swathe of the industry – preferably also including representation from the education sector and the government – might have a better chance of coming up with lasting solutions rather than band-aids.

Yet there's very clearly an elephant in the room, as the report's lead author Gina Jackson acknowledged when she presented it at the Games Impact Summit – it's tricky to talk about a skills shortage after a year in which the industry globally has laid off thousands upon thousands of staff.

The reasons for those layoffs essentially boil down to the industry cutting its losses on risky and speculative business expansion in the face of rising interest rates and tighter restrictions on financing, but the specifics of corporate finance are of little relevance in evaluating the damage done to the industry's skilled labour pool by these redundancies.

That damage comes from two directions. Firstly, there is the fact that at least some portion of the skilled staff laid off by companies over the past year will not circulate back into the games industry. Many people's careers in the games industry involve a certain tension between their desire to work on video games, and the fact that their skillset is also in demand in other, often higher-paying, industries.

The desire to work on games is a huge motivator, and the industry is a constant beneficiary of that passion; a great many people work on games because they love doing it, even though they could earn more applying their skills elsewhere.

Huge rounds of layoffs and the inherent instability to which they speak is a combo breaker for that passion, and many people will be driven to explore other career options – unfortunately, that effect is especially powerful among older and more experienced staff, who are more likely to have families and to be highly motivated by career stability as a consequence.

The second, related source of damage is at the other end of the spectrum – a generation of enthusiastic and motivated young people who would love to work on video games, have shrugged off the scepticism of parents and career advisors for years, and have just spent more than a year watching headline after headline about games