Critical Force Academy – Turning students into professionals

[Music] [Music] hello like petty said my name is Tommy Kroger owes I'm a development director at critical force and well actually I want to congratulate whoever put me after Arya to talk here because her talk freely supplements mine because the problems that she was talking about other problems so the solutions that I'm offering are to the problems that she was presenting so yes [Music] yeah clicker sorry

so I will start by talking about our company critical force for a while so critical force is a mobile game company in northern Finland in a small town of around 30,000 people called Kyani and I see several Kyani people there could you raise your hand for a while as you can see in a room of this size so many game developers from Kyani it is truly a hotbed of came development in there you might hurt about Kyani in such context as hashtag Kyani boss if you don't follow that before every event in Nordic countries there will be very fun picture and stories there or hosta Kyani always wins which is more self explanatory for you it has relating to gaming competitions as such you will find out about that once you do some research anyway a critical force we create highly appealing and competitive player experiences that define a new standard

on mobile and from that good example is our flagship product critical ops that currently boasts of 27 million organic downloads around a year ago we got the investment from image and entertainment from Korea that investment allowed us to expand and grow rapidly so currently we have offices in Korean in Finland and Seoul Korea we have around 60 people on our payroll making us largest gaming company in Finland outside the capital area yes as you noticed today's talk is about critical for soccer I mean as and as you might have guessed from my little pitch earlier this is our solution to employment problem in the games industry that we are facing today - Academy itself is organized together with Korean

University of Applied Sciences the Korean University has the oldest and best game Development Studies in Finland and these studies they were founded by the founder of critical force VPP Ronon the Academy itself it's a special training program for the best and brightest of Kyani universities game development students and for some of them it can be a direct path to employment at critical force the Academy itself it operates mainly inside the Cayenne University of Applied Sciences using its premises its equipment its teachers we as a company bring in our knowledge and expertise from professional mobile games development you all probably know that learning curve in this industry can be incredibly steep each year we get new technologies new platforms new engines it's it would

be impossible for any student to learn all this in three and a half years so Cayenne University of Applied Sciences provides a great pace for the students to go anywhere in the games industry beat Triple A in the mobile PC console all of these different areas but all of these areas require highly specialized skills in addition to create pace so and that's where we step in we bring our knowledge from the professional mobile game development to the students and we do this by organizing workshops organizing weekly coaching and feedback sessions to the students by professionals from our company and from other companies and all of these are just so that the students can learn the skills that they require in professional mobile game development skills that any company hiring them would have to teach

them anyway when they start working in the company itself of course you want to know why we do this well we want to help people by organizing to academic we help for different groups of people first can University of Applied Sciences it is to cradle from which critical force was born and many of our developers have their roots in the kion University's game development studies now that we can we want to give something back second as I mentioned earlier Finland has an employee shortage on the games industry and yet each year 100 students graduate with came development diploma from universities across the country during this day and age finding employment can

be difficult for anybody but if you think that you are trying to find employment from games industry which just your University diploma this can be a nightmare we want to help students to get their first job in the games industry and tackle the employment problem from that side also then clears of course us since any University of Applied Sciences provides the best studies it stands to reason that the best young talent comes out of that University and you might know that with a young young talent young developers the skills are not the most important thing that you are looking for fit to the company culture motivation how fast they can learn all of this is much more important to junior talent than the skills that they process when they are hired in normal situation its HR personnel personnel job to find the answer to all of these questions in on

one outer interview and if there are any HR persons there you know that it is not an easy job with critical Force Academy we have several months time to find the answers to these questions and figure out who fits into our company and well that's on quite a easy job actually and the fourth and the last one is all of you guys by teaching these skills to the students we make it more easier for you to hire them and as Aria said it is not it is a risk to hire new people so knowing that the students actually know the skills required for the mobile game development or at least some of them it makes much more safe for you to hire those young people this year was our pilot year the first time that we actually made this we learned a lot this year we learned what the University funds from academia we learned what the students want from the academy and we

learned what we want from the academy but what we have not learned yet is what you want from the Academy so after my talk after two questions and answers and so on if you have ideas please come to talk to me let me know what you think that the students would need to learn into Academy we did several things well this year something's not so well but things that we did well the first of all is the application process you probably all be in there a junior talent junior developer is applying a position in your company they sent you a cover letter that well it's it sucks they sent you CV that lacks crucial information and once they get to the interview they have not prepared at all they have not played your game they don't know anything about your company and when you ask why would you like to work for us well I need to get paid this waste your

time this way the students time it wastes everybody's time so what we do is that we organize the application process for the critical force academy that neros to realize process the students need to make the application they need to send the CV and ever get an interview very similar interview that we give to any developers that apply for our company and after all this we came to feedback for all of these three things the application to CV to interview so that once they apply for a job they are much better prepared they know what to do and they will not waste your time in addition to that of course like I mentioned the workshop the coaching the feedback this we will keep doing because these are the things that will teach students students the skills that are required they are the core of the academy basically this year during the summer we had

several months long period of the Academy we met several very promising candidates in there this proved to us that Academy itself works on two out of the four fronts designed first of all Cayenne University of Applied Sciences still produces great young talent that is eager to show their skills second the one semester long Academy is long enough to find out the true talent to find out who fits in our company because that's what we get out of it of course is to get the young talent that we want in our company what reminds yet to be seen is how much two Academy teachings help to students on getting a job the first position in the games industry and also it remains to be seen how much to academy itself helps the finnish game industry as whole he's

of course sounds like a lofty goal but hey why start small what we also found out that the professionals from our company that designed and gave the workshop the students find out that found that the making and giving the workshop is to really create break from the routine of the games industry I mean I know we are in creative industry and we don't like routines but to be honest there are all teams so that was a nice break for them and also they found out they found new ways of looking on their own specialization when they had to go back to the roots on how they do things because everybody has specialized their way of working on their for themselves and when you teach others you need to go to the basic and basics and strip out strip away the way you do things yes the future of the a critical Force

Academy well since we aren't games interested you know what we do we iterate and then we iterate some more and we iterate again so you could think that this pilot year this was our first version of the Academy we did it we put it out there we got some user feedback from the students now we take the feedback we fix things that we can we try it again next year may get some more feedback and keep on doing it as with everything in the games industry but what we found out this year ourselves that we think that needs to be done and this is for you guys when you come to tell me what needs to be taught this is what we think so also reflect on that first of all what we need to find out it's the true talent from the

students there are many different levels of students and in there there are good ones and then there are really good ones and like re I thought told us the true talent is very rare so we need to focus on trying to fight that because Penn University teaches students a lot it offers a great pace so once we add something on top of that only the best ones can get full profit from it so we want truly to find the best ones to take into the academy then the next thing are the skills that we need to teach them we need to focus on the most important skills on a mobile games development and make sure that they learn this one semester is a very short time to teach many skills so if after to talk you come to talk to me this is one of the main things that I want to find out what are

the skills you think that students need to learn to come to work on your studio because for one semester which would be around three to four months having once a week coaching feedback then additional workshops on that we cannot teach too many things to the students so let's focus on the important ones and the last but for sure not the least that we want to teach the students is the thing from which the name of the talk comes from turning students into professionals is that you all know that leap from making a student came project to making a commercial came project that millions of people will probably play it's a huge leap and for a young student to make that leap it'll take long time to understand what actually is required and we want to make the time that it takes

for the young talent to take this leap so much shorter one so we will try to teach them as much as we can what it is to be a professional in games industry it did not it is not just to make simple working prototype you need to hone the skills you need to hone the UI you need to make sure that the UX is good and you know all these things you are developers but the students might not yet know it so we want to make the gap between student and the professional smaller by making students more professionals because well why would we want to make professionals more like students that wouldn't really work yeah that's the most of the talk I will be taking questions now or if you want you can send me email on that address or you can also catch me here I will be here for the rest of the day thank you

first of all thank you for the compliment the the order is me but I know that you are good at this do you guys have questions yes just a second hello my name is Thomas nice talk thank you so I have a question here regarding the curly curriculum of the of your academia so do you have any any kind of courses where you teach students how to de-stress because I guess this industry is quite stressful and and yeah last year we didn't but like I said the

things that we need to teach the students are that they are something that we need to find out and that is actually a really good idea that we need to look into but unfortunately we are game development studio and although many of our professionals for sure know how to do themselves that it might be very difficult to teach but I will have to talk with our HR department who specializes in our company on that that thing and it might be a really good idea to get into that also thank you hi thanks for presentation is it any ways of entering the Academy outside from the kyani is it possible to apply to Academy outside Vienna yes this is not up to us like I said the Guyot Academy uses kyani University of Applied Sciences premises equipment and teachers so this would be something that would be

needed to agree on with kyani University of Applied Sciences itself I mean for us if they go through the interview and we think that they are good enough it doesn't really matter for us because we want the best people there so that's something that needed need to be agreed with them [Music] [Music]