Building Pipelines to Find, Grow, and Retain Diverse Talent

[Music] hi everyone welcome to our gdc panel i am so excited for what you're going to see today my name is nika noor i'm the executive director of the international game developers association foundation we exclusively work on increasing representation and diversifying the video game workforce we really believe in making sure that every every person who wants to make or play games deserves a chance to do so and today we're going to focus on a really special topic we're going to be talking about building pipelines to find grow and retain diverse talent but enough of that let's get to our stellar stellar panelists uh let's do a round of introductions starting with mobile hi i'm marvel and that's my dog poppy that you can hear in the background she's barking outside um so i joined unity in october of last year so i

haven't actually stepped foot in the unity office yet because of the pandemic um i i work on the inclusion team i head up inclusion for unity we have a small team there we focus on lots of different things we will talk about later but um i'm really enjoying working there's a difference for me because i haven't come from tech but inclusion is inclusion wherever you are there are nuances depending on the different industries but inclusion's primarily about so um it's about people at unity as well i'm loving it that's me awesome davina how about you hey everyone i'm davina mackey i am the director of support services and operations for playstation studios qa i've been at sie sony interactive entertainment for over 16 years started from the grassroots and i've basically worked my way up i'm also the president of black at playstation which is one of

seven affinity groups at sie and i've been president for five years um so i'm enjoying you know my space um doing de ni work and supporting underrepresented communities and uh we're we're really doing some interesting work now at sie and you know my my whole thing is if we can make an impact and make representation of underrepresented people black people specifically in my in my realm um we can we can improve the representation in tech or in the video game industry that's where i'm focused awesome trinidad how you doing hi everybody trinidad here i'm the head of diversity and inclusion at niantic i uh i'm passionate about people i'm

passionate about policy and i'm passionate about impact and so i my mantra in life is stay ready don't have to get ready so i'm always ready and i'm always ready to educate empower and utilize my genius to help people understand why all of this that we're about to talk about is imperative not only to the business but just to us being better humans that's awesome well let's dig into it let's see how we're actually developing the actions and pipelines behind these great thoughts um davina do you mind sharing some of the initiatives you're working on at your company yeah so they're they're we've had a very impactful year i i should say and i and i would say prior to the pandemic we were stuck in um cultural awareness you know we really

didn't have strategy um we we we have a new leader in d e and i her name is uh tiffany hester she's an amazing individual that introduced strategy in the e-net space is what we call it at sie and so that happened so we had new dni leadership and we also had the john platt who is the ceo and president of um sony atv which is our music licensing division he had the [Applause] the guts to go to our sony leadership and ask them to support social justice for underrepresented communities specifically specifically the black community and they allowed for him to put together 100 million dollar donation that sony specifically is supporting uh

social justice initiatives and each division within sony was able to um partake in that hundred million dollars so each of us got a piece so um playstation uh received um you know a pot and we split it with our uk counterpart so there's a portion going um to the us and the portion going to the uk and from that we've built relationships with several um organizations that promote social justice initiatives i can only tell you the few that have been announced so far so um for example game heads which is in the bay area we're supporting them black and gaming which is a part of the idga foundation black girls code and hidden genius project which is is uh for for for men so a million dollars was donated um to them from sie specifically those

four organizations there are three other organizations that we're working with um one i can announce which is the black collegiate game association and uh that organization has a network of 16 hbcu universities uh or black historically black colleges and universities right and we're doing all sorts of great programming with them they have a scholarship that falls under our playstation career pathways um which is what we've developed based on the social justice initiatives that we're doing um and so um bcga has a scholarship program where they support uh students that are upper classmen with hardships and finances and so we're working to make sure that our black students are able to actually graduate uh we were told that some of them will drop out of school for as little as 2 500 5 000. and so if if if playstation

can support those students and making sure that they complete their education to me that's a a uh we're in the going towards the right direction the next part for us is internships because we want to improve the channels that we're reaching in talent acquisition and so we're working with several organizations to build programs that will allow us to bring in uh students from hbcus specifically we've never like sie has never tapped into hbcus as a ta channel for for uh resources or our recruits um and so now we have the opportunity to bridge that gap bring in new talent from hbcus and hopefully land them a position and career in the video game industry specifically at playstation

that's awesome i love that level of investment wow if you told me three years ago today that this was the future i wouldn't have believed you so i love it i love where i can say this maybe you can't say it but i love it when companies put their money where their mouth is fantastic thank you so much trinidad i know you have been working relentlessly tirelessly sleeplessly on driving impact at niantic you do so many things mind shedding some light with our audience on maybe your current role in your current initiatives uh i i'll piggyback off davina on the game heads tip because we also are supportive of game heads and we just launched a certificate class with cal state usmb um cal state east bay not usmb cal state east bay and in partnership with unity and oculus and it's a certificate

program around well unity vr and ar and so uh it's just the beginning and we're excited because uh the goal the long-term goal is to find ways to infiltrate colleges hbcus local communities that don't have access to possible this ar vr gaming space even even just the the tech that's going out like finding ways to get people just uh a taste for it a desire for it getting it in front of them and so the beauty of game heads is that they have a program where they can teach youth and young adults from a thought inception all the way to getting it on a platform on how to navigate this game industry they have they have

something that actually works right a lot of their students are at usc a lot of their students are interning at some of our companies and working with us and so how do we get that in front of hbcus how do we get that in in the care in the south and the carolinas how do we get that in detroit and so these are ideas and a vision that we have so this is the first step step number one uh we also are last year we hosted a program called the treehouse apprenticeship program where we are creating an unconventional pipeline of boot camp talent and treehouse has pivoted so now we are pivoting to find a new partner to continue this program because last year was successful we hired seven people from this unconventional background never worked in tech before in qa and in ux i i i mentioned earlier i like changing policy it's not sexy it's not something

that on a gdc panel people are going to be like oh that's so cool but we are actually changing how we track our marginalized ethnicities and genders that that there is a broken system of the eeoc that the us requires and and it's broken because two or more races could be white and asian and in tech white and asian is a majority so like that's even that's even mis misrepresenting data and so for me i want the data to be as pure as possible because then we can make the right decisions based on the communities that we have within our company uh i also believe that we're looking at salaries reassessing where people are to to make sure there's no pay disparities these are things that like again not sexy but matter right and so i like to do a combination of both low hanging fruit and high

hanging fruit i like them to because low hanging fruit is fast easy we get short wins people are excited they go woohoo and then the high hanging fruit which takes like three to five years you know it's like uh are we done yet but no but we have these these small wins and so i do think that there's a lot around our black developer initiative that's that's hot it's new but it's also not easy let's talk about it you know at niantic we are an ar platform company we we focus on augmented reality we focus on mobile games but we really want to be the platform of the future for augmented reality how many black augmented reality developers do y'all know i'm pretty sure it's like the two percent of the two percent but they're out there and so we're really we're really trying to get awareness around the fact that we want to empower but building a program to be equitable in a

space that has for years been unequitable is one where it's taken us time we made the commitment in june of last year and it took us six months just to really make sure it informed this development program to make sure that we're proud of it and so we launched it in february this year we're on to our second cohort right now we just announced who our second cohort is and we're recruiting for our next cohort so this i mean these are little things that we're doing but at the end of the day we're just scratching the surface you know we're not going to reverse 300 years of systemic racism overnight actually 400 years so it's so how do we go about making sure that not only our leaders are accountable and committed making sure that we're still engaging our communities and our partnerships externally and in our backyard but then also building a culture that's in of occlusion where people can bring their genius to work so these are all things that are toiling into my mind every day as i'm

i wake up you know i'm not a coder and no offense to y'all coders but like i can't just like close the laptop and stop thinking about this this is this is a long term of um thing that i i hope i get to see some in my lifetime but i'm not banking on it thank you thank you so much trinidad and thank you for thinking about this even after five i think that's the tenacity that's important to keep the spirit going now mavell people talk about diversity initiatives and kind of refer to them especially in bigger companies almost as if they're u.s centric structures but that's not true because you're dealing with a whole other region of the world in a company that's doing it across multiple continents talk to us a little bit about your experiences and what you're working on over at unity yeah i mean the thing is

we have pretty much the same kind of issues um in the uk and in the email region which is obviously europe uh middle east and africa but i focus predominantly on the kind of european side of things so uk france germany finland places that we have offices but it's really it's a tricky situation trying to deal with inclusion and diversity in europe because a lot of the legislation prevents people from even measuring diversity and inclusion in in some countries in europe is actually illegal to gather data about people's ethnicity for instance or you know whether their sexual orientation so it becomes really difficult to to gauge where you should focus right because you know we know that what what gets measured gets done and if you can't measure something it's really hard to kind of figure out where you should be focused however what we've decided to do at unity is to kind of focus on where we can focus so we're able to gather data in the email region on gender

we're not able to gather any information on ethnicity but we're able to gather that data and gender so we focus our efforts primarily on gender but that doesn't mean we don't focus on other areas we just can't do it in a very um should i say in your face or explicit kind of way because we can get ourselves into trouble for doing that but we do realize that there is still issues within uh countries in europe as it pertains to ethnicity and other what we call in the uk protected characteristics which are you know things like lgbt status religion socioeconomic status so there's all those things that we do focus on we just can't necessarily measure them so some of the things that we're doing in unity on a global level is looking at and trinidad mentioned it before is looking at our data so we're taking a very data-based approach to pay equity recruiting retention and promotion at all levels because we recognize that these are things that we can control because we have our own data right so that's one of

the things we're focusing on we're also looking at introducing targets they include hiring retention targets um to increase representation of women across all unity offices so that's across aipac email and the us and also looking at increasing that representation at black and latter next level in the u.s and then some of the things we're looking at is making sure that all of our leadership are able to kind of deal with some of these issues right because a lot of the times um leadership want to be helpful but they don't necessarily understand the issues so we've just spent um the last six months embarked on a leadership training course uh we brought in an external provider to look at um how leaders at director level and above can understand race and inclusion in the workplace um and we're kind of making sure that we're embedding those practices we've just finished the training so we're now completing plans for each leader to have targets on how they're going to embed their learning and then of course we're doing things

that some of the similar things that the davina and trinidad have been doing so we're partnering with i think nearly two dozen community organizations and non-profits uh some of those most of those are in the u.s but we've just recently started partnering with some in the uk so we've got the the black text sales network here and then we're also partnering with people like nullivate black uh blacks in gaming queer tech all the other standard ones that you would see across the us and then we're also doing a number of recruiting initiatives we attend five major recruiting conferences per year and then we do specific targeted recruiting exercises with each of the directors so where they want to increase their representation we actually sit and focus our attentions on how they can do that so we're recruiting specifically for um underrepresentation and making sure we're increasing that within our leadership so we're doing a number of things and we're trying to make sure that approach is consistent from us to apac to email but as i said it's slightly

challenging sometimes when we can't kind of gather that data but we're still making sure we're focusing on those things because the issues are the same wherever they are i said at the beginning that my background isn't in tech my background's in inclusion i've been doing this work for 20 years and the issues are the same from industry to industry so we're just making sure that we're focusing on people and trying to do what we can to improve the experience of everybody that works within unity fantastic thank you so much look because we have such an incredible panel here i would like to pivot to an important topic we we talk about targeting recruitment data making sure that we've got you know this representation there and that they are well served from you know an earlier point of someone's career we've all been there we were all bright eye bushy tail let's go get it done rah-rah rule the world and sometimes the world kicks us in the back of our knees and this industry is quite relentless

not even just to marginalize folks but it can be quite unforgiving and relentless the average the average turnover rate of a gaming professional according to the igda developer satisfaction survey is two to five years and at least from the igda foundation side every year we award and support a hundred different types of scholarships and recipients that we walk through and time and time again especially people who've been in the industry for a while we are seeing underrepresented talent face severe imposter syndrome feelings that they don't belong that they weren't meant to be leaders that they can't be promoted or that they shouldn't shoot for the moon and become a vice president etc ladies how do we tackle retention not just at the company level but on an industry level how do we keep these awesome people that we are

investing time money research into into this industry because it is such a shame it is such a shame to see diverse talent leave trinidad why don't why don't you kick us off it starts with a people first mentality within um management uh and i like to call managers the frozen chosen they're hit from both sides they're hit from executive leaders giving them direction objectives and then you have individual contributors who you manage who who have their concerns and depending on the company and how they communicate and how transparent they are you're stuck you're stuck in the middle i do think that a lot of companies need to invest more time more education more empowerment to their managers uh educating them on how to have inclusive be an inclusive leader how to

inclusive hire um also empowering them with opportunities for stretch goals to show their leadership skills and and be developed uh another thing i would say is it starts at the executive leadership level if you really do believe in this dei journey or deib journey d-e-i-e-b like i mean we can add acronyms to that as well um you have to show it at your leadership level i mean you're bored i mean your executive leaders do they look like the communities that you're trying to attract and if they don't that's that's a hard miss in my opinion leadership is not something that leadership and gaming we're so particular oh you need 20 plus years of experience uh we have a mobile on on our call who didn't come from the game industry i

didn't come from the game industry i'm a leader mobell's a leader and like i truly believe that at the executive level all you need to do is give them a little boot camp have them meet some industry professionals and pillars within the industry and they too can be an industry professional and leader and i think that's just a nuance it's something that we want to do just because we can and and i think it's a blocker uh i also believe that we have to start looking at the way that we recruit uh i also think that we're sort of happy with only a certain schools you know we recruit like we have it's there's just there there's a lot of opportunity here and if these companies really want to put their money where their mouth is which all of them seem like they're doing we need to start pouring into some of these colleges that are less represented in this space and offer them opportunities to

to create a a program create a school pipeline uh also empowering more programs like game heads uh doing you know partnering we say that we all partner with black and gaming and latinx and gaming and gay gaming professionals how are we uh keeping the companies that partner with these organizations accountable to actually hiring the talent from these organizations because we can run all these uh career fairs and they're not really they're a waste of most people's time if you don't have wrecks in hand and you're not willing to interview people on the spot or at least get some type of some type of schedule where you're like boom we're committed to interviewing to this getting to the second round blah blah blah blah blah you know and so i just truly believe that there's a lot of performative stuff happening in our industry i do believe we have some great

dei leaders we have some great dei practitioners davina great dei um affinity group leaders like have been in this space for so long and it's unfortunate that only the resilient lasts and and the thing is is and that's not that should not be the case you know and that's the problem right people ask me how has your last couple years been i was like yo i feel like i've been in a boot camp i've been in the game industry only three years and it feels like 15. you know and davina god bless you you know i'm not sure how long you've been you know able to endure and obviously sony's taking care of you right like so if you find a good place then you could flower and foster and grow more power to you but what do we do about those bad managers because people leave these managers not necessarily these companies i i think all the companies that are on these panels are dope but i don't think

all of our managers are prepared to manage people who don't look like them or may not represent what they represent so why are we not a focusing on our management styles and how we empower our culture and we're focused more on a pipeline you know your pipeline is trash if the manager who the person who is coming in through the pipeline doesn't understand how to work with them empower them see them give feedback announcement feedback is not a dirty word and guess what anybody who's listening to this if you are a manager and you manage a black brown marginalized gender or an ethnicity person you better give them feedback because if you don't you're telling me that you really don't care about their growth and empowerment at your company period that's a systemic crack why and asian people don't like giving black people feedback

are you scared you think we're gonna yell at you come on you give your buddy a feedback at the bar with the beer like give me the same due diligence and give me feedback that tells me and yes i might not like your feedback so oh well my best professors in college ran me into the ground with feedback and i was just like at a young age i didn't understand i was like ugh i just hate this professor but that's the class that i learned the most from my per my old bosses who uh one was a jamaican woman god bless her soul you know who you are like she would just run me like you need to she was a chief diversity officer that was my boot camp she cared about me enough to tell me trent if you don't change your ways here here here here you're not gonna make it and look where i'm at today because she gave me feedback

and i'm telling you right now i've had more bosses than none give me like no feedback whatsoever they're oh you're doing great and then you realize i i mean i'm still here you're i'm you haven't fired me but i'm i need to grow i need to develop tell me what i'm doing wrong i know i'm not doing everything perfectly so i'll pause there because i think that those are things that companies overlook because they just want to focus on a pipeline but not focus on the the rotten apple that is that is rotting and creating a stench and you're like hmm why does nobody want to work for this manager or why does nobody want to work in this in this organization uh i mean if i take a magnifying glass i could probably figure it out incredible davina from trash pipelines feedback i know you've been at playstation for quite a long time you are one of those

early early i don't know maybe not that early maybe trinidad's right you know we're living in dog years um you know what what are you what do you think here are you just resilient i would say i'm an outlier i used to call myself a pink unicorn i'm now a white unicorn because playstation has like five black directors two of which that are senior directors right so specifically at black at playstation and sie in general they are making changes and i our leader i love our lead leader um jim ryan he has come in and he has made some instrumental impacts that has allowed us to do a lot in de i first he understood the need for deni and he brought a very um strategic and um seasoned individual with tiffany hester and what we've been able to do and he's

also changed um hr so now we have orite who is very instrumental and and knowledgeable about you know just the talent that we bring in so trinidad you you've mentioned so many key things um one of the first things that playstation has done is they've changed their performance management tool and and framework and it includes cultural leadership values and within cultural leadership values which now is not just about what you do and your goals that you accomplish is about how you do it but within that is embedded de ni and so we specifically can carve goals out within de ni space so i can talk about being a black of the black at playstation president within my goals and my manager is now understanding that because it's a part of the goals for sie and he is going to rape me on doing that job so hands down

that has been a big change in in making sure that you know how we execute how we treat our employees who are underserved you know all of the the things that um is needed is there the eni has been an impact as well because what we understood is is there is a gatekeeper there is filtering in talent acquisition we all know this and mobile you mentioned data and and trinidad you also mentioned this as well you know we have all sorts of data in in the gaming industry about women so gender is there we know you know you know we know demographics on other areas but you really don't see much in race or they don't allow us to make it public right and so like i i did a presentation that showed that

you know nationwide um the black representation in the us is about between five and seven percent black representation in tech when you come to silicon valley though that decreases down to 2.5 right so that's like half of the you know representation and nationwide but when you go to the universities you'll see like stanford if you look at the engineering program there they're about five percent black representation so there's this mis under uh this this misnomer that you know there's not enough black talent for example in the pipeline but that's not true there are gatekeepers these managers that trinidad has talked about that that have unconscious bias and you know i i think that's a new fancy word let's just say what it is is prejudice right um and the companies are not doing a great job at

providing training and holding them accountable for being prejudiced point-blank and they're keeping talent out of the pipeline period or if we do get into the pipeline again i i say that i am an outlier because i came from the grassroots i was a project coordinator when i started at sony at sie and because i had great managers like dave morant shout out to him and he allowed for me to grow i also took accountability for my career and was able to level up and you know they also paid for my education so i didn't have my undergrad when i started and sony paid for it and then i went back for a master's degree sony paid for that and i promote it each time so i'm an outlier so i won't say that there are many like me however i think that there are programs

that we're putting together within de i space that is allowing us to do a couple of extra things because i believe we as an underrepresented community have to take responsibility as well so we are looking at providing awareness that there are opportunities in the video game industry starting in middle school because if you tap into middle school kids and let them know that talents that they have in computer science skills are even of the arts so music and you know uh visual arts like you know creative drawing and all those type of skills that they can get can translate into a career in the video game industry so we're under the playstation career pathways we are working with those nonprofit organizations through the social justice initiative to build programming that starts at the middle school level and ensure that we can create pipelines

that start there so we're working with schools we're working with the universities and then you know creating programs within sony that allow for the that talent to to come in specifically hbcus is is our target as well so creating the pathways creating the internship so sony's internship is a challenge like if you're not at a certain school it's pretty much challenging to get in so we're creating a separate internship program that allows for talent within the hbcus to pipe in and those those um internships are not one set of season they basically start as a freshman and then come back as a sophomore and then they come back as a junior and come back as a senior and they end up with some sort of apprenticeship opportunity in an actual career at playstation

that to me is impacting the the pipeline um i think the place where we've not targeted yet but i think dee and i tiffany is in or reader handling this is the unconscious bias that we face making sure that those gatekeepers we break that down as well and we've asked for data we want to know things like how many black managers are there how many have been promoted how many are being paid equitably you know with their peers we want to understand when there is the rift how many are impact how many black employees are impacted and what is the off-boarding right we want to know these things because we know if we understand the metrics then we can bridge the gaps and if you don't have the metrics like mobile says then you really don't have really justification to base what you're doing off of um so you know i said a lot but

i i just think that if you know 2.7 percent in in tech black representation is bad and it needs to increase and if you go into the game industry i think is less than one percent from a a survey that igda created you know based off of gdc attendance right we have to do better than that there's so when you look at you know under underrepresented communities play games they hold large markets that need to be tapped into and and if if they are playing your games why not make sure that the people um have opportunities to see themselves represented in games correctly that people are making the games represent them right um i think that it would bring more revenue to our game companies and they just don't realize that yet

yeah move out how does unity tackle retention i know that you all focus on what you can focus on so how do you focus on retaining talent so i mean all of the things that that both trinidad and davina have said apply to everyone at unity also and i think the biggest issue is with the gatekeepers and identifying talent right because even when we get people in from underrepresented groups it's classic and it's not just in tech or in gaming you get people through the door and then you don't recognize them as talent so they don't progress right and then that's what happens in terms of your retention rates they slip because if i'm not progressing and i'm not seen as talent why would i stick around right so people leave so what we're focusing on at unity at the moment and and i'm personally working on this is building a sponsorship program for our underrepresented groups and what we're going to have is our senior leaders our senior most leaders be

responsible for sponsoring um an individual from an underrepresented group who decides to nominate themselves because we're not going to have the gatekeepers nominate who talent is and who can then have a senior leader sponsor because then we're just going to perpetuate the same old same old right so you're going to you know decide that your talent and you're going to represent yourself and say that i'm going to nominate myself for this program and then you will spend the program is going to run for about a year so you'll spend a year being sponsored by some of our most senior people within the organization and we've chosen to focus on sponsorship rather than mentoring because mentoring only takes you so far sponsorship allows the senior person to advocate for that talent when they're not in the room and that's not to say they're going to say to say to somebody give that person a job because they're my sponsee it's about saying hey you should talk to trinidad she's really talented because we know that when these discussions about what who's talented take place it's very rare that somebody who's from an underrepresented group is even mentioned and that's because the

gatekeepers have not put them forward as talent they've not been given some of those career defining opportunities that would allow them to stand out so we have to be explicit about how we manage that and that's why we've decided to create a sponsorship program so these people will then have that one-to-one key into leadership they'll get to see how the business itself operates they'll get to you know mix and mingle with people who are outside of their management chain so that they can then see you know for themselves what it's like outside of their management chain but also those people are exposed to them and what we hope will happen there is that once we've got one cohort through this process and people can see that talent does not just look like one thing we're hoping then that people start saying oh okay actually there were some really good people came through that talent that's the sponsorship program last time let's have a look at talent in a different way we really want people to start re-examining what talent looks like because if we don't we're not going to retain people because ultimately no one's going to stay somewhere they're

not growing and i love what trinidad was saying about feedback because you know again outside of tech in tech people are afraid to give people of color feedback and i don't understand why that is you know i i haven't i have a teenage daughter and i used to tell her if your teachers are not complaining about your bad behavior if you behave badly it means they don't care they actually do not care if they're talking to me about your behavior that says to me they recognize you as talent and they want you to do better and it's the same in the workplace and all of that generic feedback you're doing great means nothing it's just it's the smoke screen for not telling you what you really think because at the end of the day they're going to be high performers who are from underrepresented groups and they're going to be low performers but in order for people to progress they need to know that they're a low performer so they can improve right and that's part of how you retain people you give them that constructive feedback that is not always favorable but they're able to understand this is where i need to grow so we're really focusing in on that aspect of things so we're taking the top down and the bottom-up approach

but then also the training i mentioned before for our senior leaders of directors and above we're expecting them to take what they learned and start helping that trickle down into their management chains and that's why we're going to be working with them on an implementation plan as to how they then take some of that knowledge that they acquired and pass it on to the gatekeepers so that they can actually start fixing some of those issues that occur when we've got some of those bad managers who have unconscious bias or just you know racist tendencies or sexist tendencies because if you know what we start doing is focusing on those people and giving them the tools to do better when they don't you then have the reason and the rationale for saying it's time for you to leave this company so that's where we're focused at the moment fantastic and thanks so much for that do you mind movel actually kicking us off with our last question as we wrap here i'd love for every panelist starting with moval to kick us off with um what piece of advice do you have

for the next generation of talent for the many yous who are watching this and going i want to be them i want to do that i you know what what are we telling folks these days at least what would you tell them uh do you know i will tell people what i tell my daughter which is you can do anything you want to do but there's gonna be people who try to obstruct you and so for me it's not about trying to get a seat at the table if no one wants you to be there you make your own damn table or you you burst the doors down and tell people actually i'm talented but it starts with you believing in yourself and so it goes back to that same feedback conversation i want to tell teachers to give feedback to students if they're not doing things they should be doing tell them if they're talented recognize that and actually showcase that and put it put it where it belongs or too often children who are talented from underrepresented groups at schools

don't get told they're talented or we hide their talent or we you know we have them help other kids out in the classroom as opposed to saying let's create a gifted and talented program where we can focus on these kids and get them to shine and move them through processes sooner if they're if they're ready for it so it starts at that stage so i would tell teachers to identify talent and actually focus on it and give feedback when where someone isn't performing to them the best abilities and then talk to those individuals and tell them you know hear what people are saying to you don't shy away from feedback and criticism ask for it if it's not being given to you ask for it because you know deep down you know if you're not doing a good job right and so sometimes we sit back and we want to be told you're doing an okay job and we accept that and then we complain that actually we're not progressing but if you know you're not doing a good job ask for that feedback and ask for very specific feedback also so people will say you're doing fine okay what does that mean how am i doing fine and if i'm doing fine how can i improve

when i used to go with my daughter to um to her parents evenings is what we call them here where you had a chance to speak to teachers they would always say she's doing great and i would have a little pen and paper and say okay great how can she improve on that great what what else can she be doing and i expect people to be asking those questions for themselves we have to take responsibility for our own development especially if people don't want to help us with that so that's what i would tell people is take your development seriously advocate for yourself it's not always easy but if it's not easy for you get yourself a mentor get yourself a sponsor get someone to speak for you because that's important also and it's fine that at unity we're creating that program but there's absolutely nothing wrong with individuals going and speaking to a senior person and saying i like the way you work trinidad i love how you speak i love what you stand for would you mind mentoring me so you know don't wait don't sit back and wait to be told what to do take your career into your own hands that's what i would tell people fantastic thank you davina piece of

advice i would say take accountability for your career first and if you want to get into the game industry make sure you're doing things like participating with gdc going to e3 and understanding the various organizations that are in the industry the various publishers and game developers right make sure that your your college experience is specific to the discipline that you want to get it within because it's going to give you a higher um success rate and getting a job make sure you get an intern and get a mentor sooner than later right if you have a mentor in your college years and and you have people that can sponsor you i think that that also levels the playing field for you um make sure you take negotiation skills because there's nothing wrong i know one of the underrepresented the one of the things we do um that we can improve most is we don't

negotiate well enough our salaries when we're coming on board to these companies so take negotiation skills and don't be afraid to understand what your value is and ask for it because you really only have that one chance right and then the the other thing is once you get into the company understand from an hr perspective what training opportunities you have and make sure you always level up your skills by making sure you keep abreast of the training that's there and keep your skills sharpened and then in in your and and you need to ask your managers for one-to-ones on a consistent basis and understand what the expectations are you know for for your specific job and if you're touching base on a on a cadence that means that you shouldn't be surprised at the end of the day when when you end up with your um performance

appraisal and then you also should be doing your individual development plan so that in three to five years you know the trade trajectory of your career you know where you want to go and and then get those networks because don't only rely on the people that you know at your current job black and gaming is a great network of people from various publishers and development houses where if you get to know these individuals you have opportunities elsewhere um the networks are great so that that is my advice i know that's a lot to chew but it and it's a lot of work this is not easy guys you know if you really want to get into this industry it's fun it's rewarding uh i think you know i i can't complain for 16 plus years i've been able to do various things and have a ball

and you know people in my family regard what i do highly like i'm some big shot i even got asked for my autograph at the airport because i had my badge on and i thought that was insane but so there are perks to being at some of these companies um and it's enjoyable work so now you know that's my advice and then just have fun and make sure that you're just you're not working just for a paycheck but you have substance and it's building you know you personally but also have work-life balance and and that's that's all i'm gonna say fantastic thanks for that um trinidad mind closing us out with your last thoughts and piece of advice sure so my my advice is very simple i i think number one is network and i think this is something that everybody has said on the panel is network network network network uh we can put our names

out there we can say that we're in this industry and that we're here to help but i can count on my hand how many people actually take that opportunity and reach out and actually try to network um black and gaming is there uh latinx and gaming gay gaming professionals game devs of color igda igda igdaf like you know like there's just like you there's there's an there's so much that you could essentially just tap into and say like hey i'm interested i don't know where to start you could start at any of those places and it takes being vulnerable and stepping out and saying hey i don't know everything but i'm interested i've never been hit with resistance in this industry you may not get a response right away you may not even get a response but you will get one and so for me

i i think that's something that's overlooked and yes if you're an introvert i understand there are ways that you can write a great email that catches someone's attention there are ways that you could um send a link in linkedin message you know that is captivating use your genius use your gifts and then also once you network offer them something is there anything i can do to help is there a volunteer opportunity is there um [Music] i find that sometimes it's even hard for me to be like that's a good question and that makes me want to come back with like all right here you go here's the night here's an opportunity here's an idea i want you to do this and so another thing is when anybody meets with me for like an introductory or one-on-one i give them assignments and i'll see how serious you are if you actually come back with the assignments and those assignments are not for me those assignments are for you so understanding exactly like taking the

time to to maybe not have it correct in the sense of like you know what the future holds but actually like be like hey i have some ideas i don't know what my future could hold but i'm really interested and i just want to get in the industry like where do i start you know having those conversations and then being open open to feedback because one thing i know is at least on this panel we all give feedback and we all give feedback because we care and i i i can't say that i've you know this generation behind me i want to work for some of y'all y'all are so smart but it's also like if i'm coming to you with feedback listen i'm not hating i'm not hating on you i want you to succeed i want you to to make it in this space and it takes the divinas the movals the nikkas who've been here longer who who can come in and give you that feedback in a way that because they understand the scope and they understand the journey so i i think those two

things are being able to network being able to tap into the resources that are already out there i'm pretty sure you can rerun this and you can listen and you can hear these things and you can google search all of those things that we mentioned game heads um uh black and gaming all these organizations um in the uk there's code coven there's a bunch of you know organizations out there so how do we tap in you have to do your work and then if at the end of the day you're like dang it i forgot everything that was just said hit up nika hit up davina hit him oval hit up myself and and be like hey i'm really interested but i just don't know where to start go for it awesome well thank you to everyone and thank you to our lovely panelists special thanks to gdc for creating the space for us to have these collaborative discussions i really really support

davina trinidad and mobile look them up on linkedin and twitter they're doing some of the most important work out there in the industry today they are building out the future for folks for your studios for your talent um and sincerely what an incredible discussion what a powerhouse of women leading the way i cannot wait to see what everyone does next