Learn from Our Mistakes: What Experience Has Taught Us About Leveling Up Our Careers

[Music] the lessons from our mistakes what experience has taught us about leveling up our careers so let's get started so hi I am Dr Jen she a people strategy consultant who is deeply devoted to human sustainability and Dei initiatives my passion is about managing community-based access programs that elevate marginalized voices and support Divergent thinkers I believe people grow best in the sunshine and I hope these talks will provide some of that Sunshine for you I'm going to yield most of my time to the panelists but I do have a few things to say okay so why are we here to lean into those mistakes my hope is to further break break down those silos and the

unhealthy aversion to speaking about mistakes so I'm hoping that these mistakes that are shared will be fertile ground for all of us to grow the games industry and to be better I appreciate the panels being up here and accepting my invitations so uh they are here to speak about thriving in a tough ever evolving and often scary industry and at the core each person on this panel cares deeply about people so I've invited them because I've witnessed each one of them working towards making the games industry better and undoubtedly I hope I hope this information will be valuable for you um and to the audience thank you for coming um by a show of hands how many students do we have here just get it gauge the room here okay great great

thank you decent amount uh by show hands how many non student job Seekers out there okay so a nice mix career Changers okay people striving to be at least 1% better every day oh come on everybody okay so my hope is that I've assembled a team of experienced devs that will allow you to leave this session with at least one actionable way to make a positive difference in the games industry and in your attempts to level up your career for us in this room we're privileged enough to be here but please as you leave share what you've learned with your devs back home I want to acknowledge that there are people who cannot be here in person because of War border restrictions Finance es caretaker obligations and or

layoffs but I hope that this advice reaches them too March 22nd 2024 okay so last day of GDC this is also um this is my little tidbit here I get to add um so this is actually the last day I updated updated my resume and not just because I'm here at GDC but because of the times that I've had to hand off a resume so quickly um so that's my little tibbit for Success um but I'm going to yield most of my time to folks here so speaking of success nurturing and resilience I'm they go hand inand and it is hard out there and you will continue to be hard for the um years to come but I welcome to the podium my long-term friend Tony who will share about how in the face of adversity he found strategies to be

resilient oh there's a lot of you out there okay can everybody hear me okay despite of the mask and everything cool awesome so job search resilience and you how to deal with the greatest hits of a job search and layoffs um a lot of this is all from anecdotal experience and um I understand that your mileage may vary but these are all personal things that I've discovered and I hope you get something out of it so hi I'm Tony I'm a game designer I focus on systems and combat design and I have worked in the games industry for more than 10 years some of the games I've worked on includes Diablo I CastleVille deformers and the echo VR series

and the thing I want to talk about is four steps of job search starting with the search um I think for me we sometimes lose focus and specific goal setting will help create proper expectations when it comes to accomplishing that goal um for example I want to be S I want to be able to successfully run a marathon in 4 hours and 45 minutes within 6 months why do I put such a detail on all those things because it lets me know what I want to accomplish run a marathon which is 26 mil 385 yards right uh time frame how long do I want to do an in 4 hour 45 minutes and the amount of time that I have to prep for it which is 6 months this gives you the ability to define

specific steps you can now take towards accomplishing that goal how many day how many days do you have to run how many miles do you need to run a day in order to accomplish that goal and also better to be able to track your successes and are you hitting those goals and also it helps you to evaluate if the goal is realistic or not I could say I want to run a marathon and a week um probably not likely so my takeaway from this is if you set very very realistic and very very specific goals you will be able to figure out what you can do to accomplish that goal and the more realist the more specific that goal is the more you'll find that you are able to set steps to actually gauge whether you succeed or not on it and by the way um I know it's

tough out there the average job search time right now from what I was able to sort of do a brief search on the Internet is like six five to six months on the average so you know that's that's not that's not nothing so that is a fact and now let's talk about dealing with rejection I think following the job search we find something we apply to something we will always well some of us will end up with rejections um this is an excerpt from my own job search Excel and the reds are the rejections and the Grays are the ones the times that I got ghosted and that is just a little excerpt of it so as you can see it's not just you this happens to everyone and the biggest thing is when rejection happens chances are you won't know why most of the time

um it is important to try to get feedback and sometimes not all company is willing to give feedback but you do have the ability to ask and any chance that you do get feedback from a company you should analyze the feedback break it down and take what you can out of it and act on that AC uh action make it an action item um and while there are definitive stats in rejections um according to a survey I think most people most success successful applicants that applies for 10 to 15 jobs usually get 6 to 10 rejections so rejection is like above 50% right don't take it personally it happens well while you're you're on a job hunt

what can you do well you can improve and what you want to strive is to be better daily um it's easy to get into the downward spiral of a job search um there are only so many job applications you can apply in a day and then you end up sort of Doom schooling for for more jobs instead of doing that you should find things to work on and continue to improve yourself during your downtimes um this helped me utilize my downtime as a way to improve myself and what I did is I created a daily schedule that included time to work on things that will help me improve myself um in any way this could be a health goal this could be a future goal work goal or this could be a hobby um you don't know what will actually help you improve and I think any bit of improvement will help you maintain sanity and also feel productive which is very important during this time um last let's talk about

deservingness it's really hard to deal with the success of those around you especially when you're on the job search right you look around and people have announced that they've got something and whatnot and and my takeaway is very much like social media you often don't get the full picture of what it happens and this is especially true when it comes the story of air quotes success um being disappointed at the accomplishment of others will not help you you in any way and actually it mentally damages you and makes it hard so um focus on the positives and be happy for success in general um and what you'll find often is that sometimes the people who achieve success before you and if you maintain the friendships and the connections will be able to somehow help you further down the road um so let's do a quick recap Focus goals rejection happens be better daily

remain positive um I try to come up with a cool acronym but I ended up with a real weird word so that didn't work for me but you get the idea and finally it's we are all aware it is dangerous out there and it's not great right we don't know what someone else is going through because we're not in their head but we can be kind and support each other um final thoughts for anyone who needs to hear this you are good enough thank you we absolutely did I I can't talk today guys um we Absol absolutely did need to hear that Tony so thank you and now I welcome to the podium a dear friend whom I've had the pleasure of working within Europe and visiting in two countries in Asia and I invite IND

Inda to share her stories that she's benefited from studying and working abroad you thank you so I an in uh sorry oh it's it's the room it's the room people uh I'm adinda fosa from the Netherlands I'm a game journalist a teacher an international relation specialist at Delan College I had a fortunate H experience to in exchange between my studies yeah don't be jealous jealous at this list by the way uh to have a full-time internship at user Joy a game company in Taiwan to do a game design research master in Germany and to work one year as a course created at lingin University in Hong Kong so we like Jen early asked like who is all student in the room and well speaking to to the moment that I was 17 I went to Hong Kong for the first time

um and many International trips followed my decision to go overseas was like at this moment I realized from time to time uh new employers really liked it that I went overseas because they see the experiences that I got with it they really liked it so basically because I went abroad I get later on a lot of advantages and I'm not the only one there was a recent Mass qualitative study from arasmus plus that showed that going abroad uh has a long-term influence on your life 97% of all participants confirmed a positive influence on your life and 90% on the career path so for my internship I wanted to go to Taiwan but I had no clue to start and it was not easy I went on the website and checking all like the I could find

from for the companies and of course no response and the deadline of getting an intership was getting closer and closer and I really didn't want to do an intership in in the Netherlands because that's boring so I started to pick up the phone and just called them and uh one of the ladies uh that picked up the phone uh explained to me that it was not because uh well they most likely hadn't seen my email but it was was so much paperwork to let me come to the company and also was cultural difference and so on so at a moment uh of all those emails rejection I realized because I didn't give up I was kind of like forcing them to just hire me basically as an intern uh it wasn't about like they were rejecting me but they were rejecting to someone else coming because of paperwork and I was a foreigner which is weird um um so not everyone in this room is a

student and I believe that personal growth always goes with going abroad I mean you can do it other ways but I really believe that uh for me it changed a lot of my own uh self-esteem uh I push my boundaries and I learn to communicate with people from all over the world and I grew an amazing Network which is still really uh in inal in my career today um and I have many cool stories to tell I tell you but not now but over a beer you can ask me any weird stories it's really cool really it's best benefits ever so uh at this moment we are in a time that going remote is is getting more popular and more common so a research by HIIT marker shows that at this moment uh the Rema job is very good and even still now because we having a dire time it has 360

remote jobs open on their website when I lost checked which was last week so there are different ways to start to work overseas uh please talk me after this talk uh I can unravel like what you want to know um because this is this is going to be another talk we don't have time so as I mentioned I studied and worked in several countries overseas and I learned that research doing research is really important because every single country has their really little nitty greedy details um visas injections whatsoever um just I really like this website uh that you see on the side uh Hy visas check before you go which country you go because it's ah it just prevents so much stress to know things

beforehand so uh Jen mentioned already the resumes earlier uh I want to say that apart from visas resumes also have like a lot of different things there are different countries with different personal information descriptions some countries likes your photograph some don't uh your length can be different the structure um and maybe I mean I'm in America but I that maybe you don't know what the A4 is well uh please if you don't search it because it's really good to show that you understand the culture you show employers that you uh take that extra step and that is super important and of course our world is getting globalized and people understand there are differences but it is really that extra little M that makes your employer realize that you are taking them serious

so making the additions decision to work overseas is a big one I mean I can keep talking about this like for an hour please I shouldn't so um before that you should make a SWAT analysis so write down your strength weaknesses opportunities and threats um so for me uh for example uh I had an education uh I wanted to teach in uh Hong Kong in Taiwan and Hong Kong but they said I need a master so these kind of things can differ from countries your portfolio is still really important in our community um don't forget that apart from the resume um and I already learned the language so I already uh could speak some Chinese so for yourself write down what are your internal strength and weaknesses and get it noted because you should ALS also note what are your

external uh strength and weakness the things that you don't have control on so uh this is going to be a package of text but it will Foster out where you want to go so I want to stress that working abroad especially when moving to a new place is not an easy decision a lot of things need to be considered but I invite you to think about all the new possibilities that that comes along with it thank you I appreciate your International perspective adenda now I'm excited for Angela's talk um I've seen Angela work closely with so many mentees um in early phases of job preparation helping them to decode job applications for goodness of fit and Angela renews my optimism and she pushes

boundaries of my thinking and of the mentees that she's working with in such creative approaches so I look forward to your talk Angela hello welcome to life lessons from the hunt uh the job hunt so who am I hi I'm Angela G pronounced she they and currently an associate sound designer at nether realm studios in Chicago I did not go to school for games I am selftaught and two years ago I was in the middle of my own job search learning and putting all of these tips and tricks to use these are my stories about the things that worked for me so please take or leave them as you see fit so throughout my time applying for jobs these are the four big lessons that I learned I'm going to share two with you and then Tony already and Tony and

trento are going to do a deeper dive onto the last two first one will be do your due diligence research network maintenance we'll come back to these and then expect nothing prepare for everything do the work to make sure you are ready for the Jus in cases like an interview but if you send off every application with an expectation of success or even a response it will only drain your energy and enthusiasm and you already heard Tony her uh talk about this and my favorite piece of advice be your ambitious passionate and genuine self because this is the only person you can be and actors know and I learned in my theater career that you shine the brightest when you are your most genuine self and that's what draws people in which

trento will be talking a little bit about later so due diligence research common advice is to know the company that you're applying for I found that the most critical aspect for me was to know as much as you can about who you're talking to so search the company see if you can tell the size what they're known for the games they make the team composition and who you might be working with or talking to if you can't find something that would be something good to ask in the interview uh don't be like me who is woefully uneducated in mainstream anything except like jpgs and audio and uh panics whenever someone from laran Studios walks up to and then introduces themselves and I can't pinpoint exactly what game I'm supposed to know them from and uh that I can connect and chat about them with the multi-award winning uh Game of the Year balers Gate

3 I do know balers Gate 3 uh so next network maintenance networking is making friends keep it simple keep it chill keep it calm if you think about networking like this it helps lower the pressure you put on yourself and it helps you to be more confident and easy to approach and talk to after meeting someone use Discord Twitter LinkedIn what whatever you like to reach out and reconnect occasionally uh I saw this thing and it reminded me of this conversation we had at GDC I played your game and I loved the music this is important for keeping friendships having professional friends locally can be a GameChanger if people are easier to get to they're easier to keep in touch with and if you can't think of anything else to say send a meme appropriate work safe memes

please for example uh when the winter storm hits in Chicago uh you can send this to the Mortal Kombat team last the mo uh the last most important thing about network maintenance so I asked a few lovely folk for their experience in the job hunt around the world I pulled these quotes from their answers about finding jobs in the UK Sweden South Africa Indonesia and Canada and though they all have wildly different experiences their answers to me showcase a through line that even in the international context the most important thing for any job hunt is to talk to people and build relationships so if you'll indulge me look to your left look to your right these people next to you uh they could become your new best friends your

future boss your co-workers someone who will help you navigate your next obstacle with or someone you'll just smile in the hallway after this maybe introduce yourself after the talk okay my final and greatest piece of advice is to do your best to relax so that you can be your genuine self and to put your best foot foot forward there is only so much that's under your control at some point you've prepared for everything all you can do now uh and now it's out of your hands the only thing left to do is make sure there aren't any red flags so I ran across this quote recently in Rob Bridget's book about audio I'm an audio person make everything audio um I really love the quote though so I'm making it apply here the thing about bullets is you can dodge

the easy ones but not the others and you cannot Dodge them all so Dodge the easy bullets the telltale signs and leave the others in the hands of Fate there's nothing you can do about those anyways you did your work you put in the effort you have prepared what you can you've Dodge the nastiest bullets now sit back down have some tea and let the winds take you where they will thank you I'm supposed to keep track of time but I get so lost in these stories thank you for sharing that that was incredible um and uh I want to emphasize that last part about the relax that's uh it's really important we stress out so much about trying to get that next job um so

in a moment we're going to hear from fousy um and I I didn't invite him here because of his title um but because he cares about people and um when I've asked people uh I was to join this panel I was looking for people who've been inspired um who support International communities so I manage a team in Europe and I've seen through action um fousy supporting us helping to Elevate people finding their best job fit so welcome to the podium fousy thank you so much for the humbling introduction hello everybody maraba my name is fousy um 21 years in the business in uh game design and creative Direction roles I'm currently the VP of global creative at Ubisoft so oversee uh and help uh creative uh teams across uh Europe bring

their Creative Visions to life um I'm xca xking and other companies shipped a bunch of games from Mario rabbits to Star Wars to battlefields and on uh I'm on the board of education for future games which is one of the leading schools in uh Sweden and um I wrote alal Art of game design one of the first books if not the first one to be written about game design in Arabic and uh uh uh just got the ambassador award a couple of days ago thank you thank you so um I've been asked to do two two very difficult tasks one of them is to recount all of my mistakes in five minutes which is impossible I could have been here for a long time and also to speak only for five minutes which is also impossible I tend to like to do that quite a bit so I'm going to try my best here and uh Dr Jen you can always kick me when I'm over time and I've also listened to Angela's advice there's a lot of memes in this presentation so I want to um walk you

through like some very anecdotal uh stuff that happened to me early on in my career some mistakes that I believe that I made or like you know tough stuff that I've been through so hopefully you don't have to um I started my career in Jordan and here we go this is one of the first tough ones if you can help it try to be born somewhere with an industry it makes things it makes things a lot more easier for you um um but if you can't uh control where you're born um consider relocating entirely uh to be close to the industry where there are schools where there are companies where there are places where you can join people that have done this stuff that you can learn from or otherwise do what I did you keep learning doing the things make mistakes and pick up from them um uh my first project for example me and my friends um this is me when I had hair uh we started our own Studio there were nine of us and we started working on the vertical slce for Game Boy Advance RPG of the time uh one of the firstest kind in the region and there's a lot of mistakes in the sentence that I just mentioned um

because if you um if you can join an already existing team or company so that you can learn from their experience um even if it's not the type of game you want to work on or like the type of project you were like dreaming to join the industry to do um you get to learn what it's like to be in a game team you get to learn what it's like to work on a game and you get to learn from those people's mistakes and that will make things a lot a lot easier for you when you like actually get to work on the stuff that you like um you get to see what it's really like to be on the ground in a studio regardless of itself size but if you do want to start your own studio um we started as nine people I would probably say you don't want it to be a large team um something like anything anything over five people as you can imagine will cause a lot of complexity especially when it comes to coordination communication unifying the vision and not to mention cost it's really hard to get five people to agree what to have for lunch imagine if you have to you know get more people involved right um and also like don't start with an RPG you know um or a relatively large project um what you want from your first project is that you

want to finish it um you start with something that is the smallest possible so you can learn finish and then move on to the next one grow your skills one project at a time and also try not to let your first project be your magnum opus um if you just started running it would be ridiculous if I asked you to win the golden medal in the Olympics uh making games just like any other skill is something that you grow so you show up every day and you do the work and you grow your skills one day you will have the skills and the personal insight to make that magnumopus um and so when my first project inevitably failed um uh we were never able to finish it and release it I took that very hard on myself and almost left the business alt together and here's one of the bigger mistakes is I was not kind to myself you know and you really need to be kind to your self because putting a lot of stress on trying and tying your

failure to your ability to continue in your career is a sure Pathway to burnout um so you know fail fast move on be kind to yourselves mistakes are part of the learning process and even though I'm here standing telling you about the mistakes I made they are part of who I am and why I'm standing here in front of you today I have not failed I have tried 10,000 ways that did not work and you know when I was in an indie team I was wearing many hats you know like I could write music I could code I could do 2D art I could do UI level design and all kinds of stuff so therefore I thought I qualify for all of this so I started applying to all of these jobs froma from particle effects to level design to game design and uh at some point I was getting more rejection letters than there were days in the month and that's that's a a mistake so like what what you want to do is that um I see a lot of people make the same mistake and uh while it's great to

explore so that you can finally pick the area that works for you um and where you find in your heart and ultimately you need to focus your efforts um there are only so many hours in the day and you're growing your skills as we spoke about earlier having a defined Focus allows you to focus on the time and the results so be result oriented visualize the end goal and then pour all of your effort towards it what is the skill set that you want to grow and how can I focus on learning that skill set that I'm missing what are the knowledge gaps behavioral changes and experience gaps that I need to add to my skill set to be able to be on my path to my end goal who in the I ask you a couple of questions for you to ponder on who in the industry inspires you what do they have that you don't and how do you get it simple example example uh say that you want to work on company X company X

probably has employees those employees has employee uh uh internet presence portfolio LinkedIn profiles Etc have a look see what are the things that made them employable for that employer that you really want to work with uh how can you get your portfolio similar to this what are the skills the behaviors the experience that you need to grow to match and uh the only thing I didn't do wrong is that I wanted to persevere no matter what no matter the setbacks I knew what I wanted to go there was a person that inspires me I knew the skill set that I wanted to grow and I persevered you show up every day and you do the work but you be kind to yourself so to summarize my advice to you you show up every day you do the work you pick projects that you can finish you don't overestimate your skills and underestimate your projects you go to where the jobs are you become undeniable by makinging yourself desirable for the roles you

want and you be kind to yourself thank you very much fousy I think your message of being kind to ourselves Segways perfectly to an inspiring and important talk from trento about authenticity thank you trento [Applause] I didn't trip on the way up here so that's a great start hello everyone my name is trento Von lindenberg I'm the CEO of mold breaker interactive a new company founded in November 2023 and sorry F we didn't take your advice we are a 10 person studio so we'll see how that one turns out in a year but a year ago I was in the same position position that at least a third of you were where I was looking for a new job and 4 years ago I

had just graduated so today I'd like to talk to youit about the mistakes that led me to where I am today in my first few jobs and why The Importance of Being authentic matters especially in landing the job that's right for you now as a quick note there is no magic solution nothing that I say today will get you hired tomorrow and I trust me I wish I could nothing but I hope that you can learn from my mistakes and that in listening to what we're about to share that the job that you do get will be the right one for you so let's talk about my mistake one of them at least and specifically my mistaken approach to interviews now we've all heard the uh recommendations of you have to make sure you review exactly everything that's on

the application Page look at what they're saying what they want in the resumes edit your resume to the skills do everything to be the perfect person that they want because there's thousands of people competing for that job we've all heard that right and while that is true you do want to develop your skills towards something what can often feel like is I have to edit myself I have to be and sell something that I am not entirely comfortable being and you start to say things in interviews that maybe you don't really feel and think at least for me one thing that I often hid was I really really care about work life balance I want to protect my team above all else no I'm not going to stay here till 8:00 p.m. every day or work on Saturdays because I have hobbies and passions outside of this that I care about instead when asked would you be willing to pull an all nighter would you be willing to work over hours are you willing to do everything and anything you can make the best product possible I'd say yes yep

yes but that inevitably led to the realization I made the wrong career choice that I would land myself in a culture where I didn't fit in I sold myself as this person that they wanted but not who I wanted to be and I did this because I was desperate for a job I needed something even if it landed me somewhere I really really didn't want to be So eventually I burnt out I left I couldn't take that job for more than a year and I de thought it was time to approach with a new T I started with interviewing the interviewer we'll get on that one in a second and realizing that I had to be truly authentic and let my inner Gremlin the thing that I was afraid of showing show let's start with interview the interviewer I'll share a similar thing to what Tony shared earlier and say I applied to over

275 jobs last year these are the only ones that I had tracked and we're going to ignore the fact that I got rejected or ghosted from all three of them and focus on the fact that even though I was being authentic and answering and asking all the questions I possibly could I still got three offers but I also turned down those three offers because I asked them questions like what's your production philosophy what do you care the most about what is something that you can't stand about this job and you would change the answers I got were not satisfying they had me realize wow even if I get this job I actually really don't want to work here and even in this economy that meant that I saved myself possibly getting laid off within the first three months or getting burnt out all over again and possibly leaving industry entirely being authentic on the other hand can mean a number of things can mean telling the truth and being honest with what matters to you it can mean

sharing your flaws and being able to articulate your growth this is what people mean when they say don't be afraid of being honest about the mistakes that you have made as a hiring manager I want to hear that that will tell me more than anything about the thousands upon thousands of successes that we share every single day which ties in with knowing yourself and being willing to be vulnerable now I know this is scary because I've been there being vulnerable means being open to critique but being vulnerable is a very key part of someone knowing who you are at the end of the day people hire people people will hire you for who you are at least where you want to be will hire you for where you are I know that's a tough ask being vulnerable hurts but it is necessary let's look at an

example at a recent posting we put out for a social media manager part-time roll new studio 20 hours a week not as much pay as I would have loved to have given we got over 400 applications in the first week we only were able to interview six and the six that we picked were the ones that were the most authentic to themselves not just the people that had great skills they all did the people who told me about their passion with the Neopets Community or about a Hindu mythology comic series they wanted to write in the future for a community marketing position that was what got me convinced those are the people I want to interview it helps you stand out not like one of the hundreds of others which is why being authentic really matters be authentic not to get hired but be genuine to get hired in the place that's right for you thank

[Applause] you I want to pause with this thank you slide because I think it's really important and I appreciate you including all the people who supported you trento so I know we have some career changers in the room and it is a great honor to invite our last speaker uh for Hope and honest sharings uh so I think there's no better way to end GDC 24 with Lara wow y'all are just wonderful thanks for being here um okay hi I'm Laura I have had four

careers before landing in games my kittens are named nocturn and Fiddlesticks I had no idea they were League names before I chose them I I craft I play games I have ADHD I have uh anxiety I sometimes suffer from impostor syndrome uh and I'm a development coordinator on fortnite BR as a dreamer who once wrote a list of 63 careers that I thought might make me happy I've always hated the question what do you want to be when you grow up how could I possibly limit myself to just one option when I said I did when I said I didn't know people always responded with some version of oh that's okay you'll figure it out one day what they didn't say is it's okay to change your mind during a coveted acting internship in college I went through a bout of depression I knew I was good I knew I could do it but could I actually was it a mistake to be

there when I finally got the courage to talk to my mentor about this their response unfortunately completely drained my morale they said if you think you can be somewhere else and do it you probably should there's a whole bunch of people who want to be here and can't imagine doing anything else completely destroyed me I actually left a career that I loved a lot because I took that word as the only option and hindsight the path wasn't actually the problem the problem was the group of people I was with honestly my career would probably look very different today if I had been with a different company or asked a second opinion it took me years to feel comfortable to ask that question again and when I did the answer was incredibly uplifting and it propelled me further in my career at Epic if you find yourself suffering from impostor syndrome it's worth checking in and asking yourself these following questions you can answer no to any of these these questions and still deserve to be where you

are it might be good to check if a different version of here could help you thrive the voices in your head can and will lie to you the voices outside your head will also lie to you even if they think they're trying to protect you I did want to take time to make a special call out while everyone deserves their place to be here and really everyone does marginal Iz groups tend to suffer from impostor syndrome more than groups that are already well represented in this industry so this one's for you you deserve to be here and for everyone else how are you making your here the right space to be down the line at a job shadow I was very excited about I was talking to a person that about how I loved two separate disciplines at that company and I inquired if I could switch one day I was very passionate about both I had studied both in college they replied I have plenty of people who just want this

track and they worked really hard if you want to be somewhere else why would I hire you it's not fair to them I feel like I worked really hard too but I took that as a rule of success again second mistake I stopped being curious then I stopped uh I pretended like my dreams didn't exist and I burnt out really really hard pigeon ho holding myself caused so much heartache and I lost years of growth I shied away from opportunities and I know that there are companies out there that lost out on an incredibly passionate and driven employee after over a decade of that something finally had to give echoing some of trento's points it is more than okay to ask vulnerable questions but take care to recognize the answers you're given are just a data point they are not the entire story no one gets to tell you what your path is only you get to decide what the right one feels like I absolutely love my

current career but I don't think the journey getting there needed to be so painful my first GDC in 2022 I didn't fully engage with anyone because I was worried I would say something stupid and get blacklisted before I got in I went to a Wiggy event I met the dream person in my dream career at my dream studio and the only thing I remember saying is that's cool thanks so take my advice it will always be easier to interact with people not with job titles not with uh not with job titles not with their job not with their title you may think that they're the rock stars of this industry but they are also just people the memories that will stick are the moments that you have a chance to genuinely connect with each other uh compliment a patch that someone has on their bag compliment someone's gaming tea talk about a talk that you noticed you both were in I've had hundreds of conversations since that GDC 3 years ago but the ones

I remember are the ones where we actually stopped and took a minute to see each other and connect it can be easy to feel like you're losing your identity when you get pushed out of a career that you or doubt your choices you are not one thing you are not your job you are not your title you aren't even this industry you are you you are made up of hundreds of likes and dislikes and interests and hobbies and opinions just like every other person in this room that's the stuff that will make a lasting impression you can lose your job you can get pushed out of a career or you can change your mind and you can still be you on my intro slide you'll note that my title was just one of the things on there and it wasn't even the one that I value the most lastly I'm going to leave you with my favorite piece of advice if you remember nothing else I hope you remember this care 10% less 10% less is still an a no one will notice that you were caring less except for you and the only thing that you'll notice is more energy less

stress and more sustainable actions that will lead to a better you and a better industry so take it from someone who jumped from theater to Barista to book seller into games it is okay to follow winding paths it's okay to change your mind it's okay to try and fail it's okay to ask questions and be curious about your options it's okay to ignore advice that doesn't work for you I promise you will still be hirable I promise you'll be hirable if you pivot again I actually think that my job I'm better at it because of my varied experience and I've heard that from more than just myself I've heard it from so many people it's not always easy and some might scoff at your path but it is always going to be worth it and as long as your coaching things with sense of curiosity passion and authenticity

you're going to be just fine thank [Applause] you all right I saw lots of heads nodding yeah and uh I will try that uh care 10% less I love that advice and um I really appreciate you establishing that we belong and now we will open up to some questions we won't have time for every question here but we will stay around and we'll be able to answer after we have to get off the mic um but we do have some microphones over there if you're welcome to and we'll we'll alternate places and we'll take the first question hi uh

thank you so much for being here it's really uh great to see all these insights into the industry that we just really don't get in a professional level you can just want to be your best self but sometimes that's just um not the best approach um so this one goes to FY um I really enjoyed your talk and so you say you want to build a skill and you also mentioned that like time is limited there are just only so many hours in the day say you're you have a day job or you're a student and then you arrive home late in the afternoon you're really tired how do you keep cultivating the skill set that you need in a kind of limited time or Limited schedule can you repeat the question can so the question is you have limited time how can you cultivate these skills did I capture that correctly F you can start and then we'll open it up wonderful thank you for your question so I think like um the way

I approach it I think I I go a little bit almost literal to the topic how much time do I have and how much time will it take for me to acquire that skill so I try to actually literally get the number of hours I do a Time audit regularly for myself which is a weird thing to do I admit um and I I see how much time I have a week that is available for me for growth and um I will you know whether it's an hour half an hour 20 minutes 5 minutes you know what is how much time can I allocate a week for growth and for the skill set how much time uh would it require me to learn that and it's amazing how you can like actually find a lot of quantifiable information to this topic for example I was learning Japanese I discovered that you need 550 hours to be adequate at Japanese when I looked at I have 2,000 hours in Dota 2 I was like could probably do that yeah and Angel I saw you leaning and I was just curious

if you wanted to jump in there or okay no I'm just listening anyone else want to jump in on that question okay thank you for that question thank you so much we pleasure over here thank you fzy uh hello so my question was okay so two years postgrad no job prospects yet what advice cuz you you touched on a little but what advice would you overall have to say like hey don't give up yet like how do you keep that momentum going so the job search taking a long time how do we keep going we'll do ainda then trento so for me I always wanted to find out what I really want and then I'm going to really check what should I do like for example the Hong Kong job I should have been a learning service tutor I was I had no clue what it was I

just searched on Google oh okay I guess this and this has connection with it so uh that was the way how I approach it I really search what do I want what do I need and that's the way I I look at it yeah this is not actionable in the oh this will get you the job that's same C I did audio in the past I should know how to do that uh it's not action when the this will get you the job but it will hopefully help you feel better and that's find Community find a friend find hopefully multiple people who are in the same position as you and find camaraderie and the we're all looking for this together they'll also be able to help you develop your own skills maybe you can make a game Jam do projects together do something small and continue to develop your skills like was mentioned before um I I have a little bit of like somewhat scientific approach to that which is um find out what you're doing

and sort of like list everything that you're doing and and your varying levels of success and then start changing the patterns of each thing and how you approach it and see what kind of result you get as you start to change things um if you continue to do the same things and approach things the same way and get the same results then you need to change your approach and if you change too much you you won't actually know what led to the success but if you start changing one thing at a time you can actually see the difference that it'll make and then you can start tweaking the other things that aren't working are you uh to repeat the comment what are you a designer and then we have another question over here um hi uh I'm I'm a high school student I'm a junior in high school right now um I I'm live in Colorado um for this my first time at

GDC probably won't be here for another few years um I don't get to do things like this very often so networking for me is difficult I'm pretty young still so I you know I don't get to meet a lot of people in the industry um a lot of internships start at like I keep hearing sophomore junior year of college I'm not even there yet um do you you guys have any like tips sort of advice for is there a way to Network online or instead of like having to travel everywhere or I don't know I just don't have that much access first of all way to way to take the step to come here that's incredible so the qu the question is how do we Network online when we cannot be in these spaces so I thought I saw someone leaning over here here I did Lean in it's oh Angela also there was

that lean I'm going to give you one for just like a year down the line you see all these lovely humans in the pink shirts they are a part of something called the conference associate program and it is how I got my job um it is a wonderful community that I definitely couldn't have done this without so applications normally open up in October and you decide or you you get picked if you are lucky um in December and uh yeah it is one of the greatest networking opportunities of a lifetime highly recommend then Angela um so online spaces there are resources um I'm worried about you cuz you're in high school so I'm going to focus on like other things like local especially like you said Colorado right yeah yeah Colorado there's probably like schools around you or something I find that reaching out to people like especially professors or something they're really

receptive if you want to learn they want to help you learn like if you can find also if there are other um Professionals in your area they want to help you if you want to reach out uh yes I I do know a few there's a few game developers in Denver I um and I I mean I do go to a game development program I talk to my teacher about it um but it's just I know you know I don't just want to walk up to serting forge and be like hey are you guys doing internships or like come like can I can I talk to you it's I feel like that's kind of difficult well why not be a little Brave and just email them and be like hey does anyone have a couple minutes to talk like I'm super interested I just have a couple questions prepare a couple questions do you have 15 minutes and like just leave it at that if it's super low stakes like keep it low stakes for yourself keep it low stakes for them everybody has 15 minutes here and there you know what I mean and if all it takes is to respond to an email to you maybe they'll do it it off and trento final thoughts on that

question uh I think Angela you mentioned earlier but networking is about making friends ask honest genuine questions and if you don't go into it with an agenda of I want a job and just hey I'm a student I'd really like to learn more about this can I ask you some questions I think 99% of developers would be more than happy to make the time for that okay perfect thank you so much so thank you everyone for coming we will stick around I know there's another question for um that you probably all have questions so we will stay around and answer questions uh for the conference Associates do we we need to leave the room is that correct they're they're this is like the last talk in this room for the day they will be closing the building soon uh because they're ending early today so you know if you can clear the room B yes yes so that the answer is yes so we will meet you in the hallway [Applause] [Music]