Our Games Are Not Linear, So Why Are Our Careers?

[Music] hello hi oh god I got hi thank you um so ice is wonderful there's a lot of people here to kind of listen to me which is awesome because this was actually just something that I kind of that some friends were doing and it was something I got really passionate about and I started spending a lot of time thinking about it and so I'm delighted you're kind of all here to to see this so my name's Nick button Brown the idea for this session came from a friend of mine was writing a book about different career structures and I ended up having a chat tour and my half hour chat became a three hour chat which went over two days which became about the games industry and how the games industry is so different to all the other industries around and it was all really exciting and it's like you're so it's um thank you for coming along and thank you for listening to this talk what sure what

she did when she was talking was she she presented this idea to me of a career lattice has anybody heard the term career lattice before a couple of people okay and it did this thing where it just it almost made sense of the things that I'd done and it kind of came just I hadn't done it deliberately but all of a sudden it was like yeah okay that that kind of I wasn't completely insane in the decisions that I made but to be honest I do need to start with a disclaimer I didn't know this theory I didn't know this structure when I started crafting my career and you know generally my career choices have been on the basis of opportunism self-confidence and whim and can be looked at at best as a series of ill-conceived and accidental events but I'm going to talk today about the idea of career lattice and I'm gonna explain some of the benefits and then look at a little bit on how to build it okay

you've got to start with my own career I think that's a that's a reasonable place to look and I did when I thought about this speech I forgot that this was going to be streamed and would be on YouTube so I have various humiliating pictures of me I started off I was brought up in a theater family has brought up in the theater family in the 70s and 80s which results in some horrendous fashion faux cars and trust me nobody can carry off a gold LOM a jumpsuit at the age of 14 I was one of 10 dodge DD men prizes was seeing which one I was anybody get it I'm the guy I dressed as the British police officer on the Front's on the right I I appeared in pantomimes every year but at the same time I was kind of really good at maths okay anybody guess this one yeah okay

that one's a bit easier on the tall guy I I trained to be a dance teacher I appeared regularly on a TV show which must be one of the longest-running blow points of the televisual arts called the hit man and her it was terrible it ran between two and four on a Saturday night and nobody ever watched it sober I joined a boy band I used to perform alongside take that way before they were famous when they were just kind of getting started there still take that I I kind of gave that up to go to study math at Oxford the last thing I did before I went to university was I auditioned for a family soap ad a time family soap and I got down to the last two and I lost out because I lost out I went to university the guy lost out to was Jude Law so I was that close to being Jude Law yet that close what I

ended up doing was I became I'm so yeah I became an accountant I became an accountant because I didn't really know what to do I came to Canton because they were the people hiring when I left University and nobody else was I realized I wasn't a very good accountant because I thought anything under seven figures was a rounding error and so perhaps it was best for me to move on I was lucky enough not to get hired in the record industry which was what I was trying to get into and ended up going into games which was my passion it just didn't seem like a proper career I I then joined who I then joined EA I joined EA as an accountant and I ended up moving across and helping set up EA partners so any a partners I worked with dice and with a kind of insane German developer that was about to launch an FPS up against doom 3 that was far cry I

ended up liking them so much and I loved the insanity I joined them spent five years there I was managing their studios we had 700 people working on games I then left that to join an insane startup in England which was developing distributed servers and it was living in a Silicon Valley world and I can assure you that Silicon Valley is a documentary not a comedy from that I was elected on to the board of trustees at BAFTA I'm now head of games at BAFTA I did I I did my absolute passion project which was a VR game with a film studio and I loved it and it got killed from there I I now work with a few different companies including sensible objects which is a wonderful physical digital smart toy do

we have Alex in no okay all right so the career ladder I didn't really follow a traditional career ladder I think you know that that's kind of clear the career ladder assumes everybody's going to progress upwards and it seems they're getting better at what they're doing that the industry you're in is the same in 20 years as it was 20 years ago ultimately this is based on the kind of world where you're loyal to one company games industry we're definitely not spending there are a few but most people don't spend all their lives at one company I promise it doesn't work so well our people are different industries live and die very quickly and you have to evolve to compete but the way you do you change jobs you find better ways of doing something or the new tech exists and makes the way that you were working before redundant and you know to be honest we don't want to have the same jobs as anybody else anymore we want to have our own jobs won't have our own want to do something which is individual to us so the career ladder I really can't read that on my screen it

relies on a traditional hierarchy it relies on this kind of singular path upwards it relies on you know low workforce mobility and your loyalty is based on promotion and salary which takes me to the idea of the career lattice it's a better model for today's flexible and fast changing work markets where you need to be self-reliant and agile ultimately you should set about acquiring skills that are strategic to what you want to do or what you might want to do as well as dealing with the skills the lack of which is the career block everybody know what a career blocker is if you don't know it you've probably got one it's a skill that stopped you progressing yeah I mean you need to build the experiences that you can base future work and decisions on you need to get the technical skills of course but really importantly is you need the network's you need the networks of people that will help you it's not necessarily to get another job but people can give you advice people that

can give you support so what does the career lattice work better for I mean it's more conducive to this flatter more matrix structure we have within games you can have multiple paths you can choose your own route and it adjusts as your needs change over time yeah it relies on high workforce mobility and your loyalty is based on opportunities rather than being tied to something it's based on a new opportunity that allows you to do something else so what's the theory and the career lattice is a more creative way to look at your career it's it's a diagonal framework that breeds lateral experiences adjacent skill acquisition and peer networking don't worry I'm going to talk about this a little bit more it allows you to move to a variety of positions which you are now able to do because you gathered these skills it's about evolution it's about evolving it's about

changing and it allows you to grow all the time you're always growing you're always finding some new skill always finding some way to improve yourself okay so you saw what I did what did I get from from my career lattice I worked on the Hitman and her it taught me about confidence taught me about the power that confidence has it also gave me a far too detailed working understanding of hotpants working in a boy band okay I'm not being flippant here working a boy band was all about egos managing fragile egos I was the one that learnt to manage everybody else's egos that's probably the greatest lesson you can ever learn is how to manage other people's egos you know studying maths taught me how to think laterally and and kind of pick up problem-solving being I DOS taught me the fallacy of success you know what the fallacy of success is the

idea that because you've been successful you knew what you were doing it's great they were really successful it was all fantastic gonna carry on doing the same thing then they went bust three times got bought out you know it is a fallacy often you're just lucky you can do good things and you can make yourself lucky but you can't rely on the luck I did my MBA taught me how to think differently it really taught me how to work on my people skills as well you know most people don't do an MBA for that but actually the the way of thinking how I interact with a team the way of constructing teams i working with EA partners taught me about managing relationships you know I was working with developers great developers around the world how are you doing that remotely how are you how are you doing it face to face Crytek taught me to make a game from end to end that's a big thing you know I covered every part of making a game you

know improbable taught me just working with a bunch of really really smart people you know that I was used to being one of the small his people in the room I go there and Wow yam still one of the smartest people in the room and you know actually sensible objects is an interesting one cuz it's taught me about making my own decisions every other company I've had somebody else there and you know I want to do this no you can't do that oh well if I'd done that it would have been fantastic and I go to the smaller company I want to do this Larry's looking at me going alright then okay what if I get it wrong that's what you have to learn so what would be a good lattice role you want access to best practices you want to learn things that you can take and and kind of carry on using for many years you want to add technical skills you want to add life skills I'm going to talk about like life

skills are really important life skills are the most important thing you can learn within a lattice you want to learn how to make decisions and I mentioned it before you want networks networks networks make everything work so best practices can you work with an expert how would you find a job that would help you with best practices who are the people that do what you're interested in the best can you get to them can you learn from them can you find a well-run company can you do things that can you do things well in all areas of their business or could you look at a completely different industry you know you're really interested in creativity well go and spend a year at Pixar you're going to learn a huge amount about creativity but maybe you're really interested in Commerce can you work really closely with Amazon you know they do so many wonderful things this one's the most dangerous work with people who don't agree with you you learn so much

from them but it could really piss you off I've done this it's difficult I'm glad I did it but I wouldn't do it again but I definitely learned a lot I mean ultimately you've got to think creatively and don't necessarily take the easy option easy option is always the one in front of you but actually sometimes you need to go off and do something else life skills so no sorry technical skills you do need to pick up technical skills but it's not just the technical skills that make you a great artist actually are there bunch of technical skills that may help you into other things just understanding project management is a wonderful thing anybody that understands project management is so much stronger you know you theoretical science the background of doing this you want to improve your existing skills but don't just focus on your best skills you want to make sure that your worst skills

aren't stopping you from developing that's back to the career blockers idea you can't make your worst skills into your best skills but you can make them not that bad stuff but not that bad not that bad okay so life skills I this you know this is really important to me you've got a you can learn to work in a rapidly changing situation it's it's kind of hard if you don't know what you're gonna be doing from day to day you come in and everything's changed again and you know you come back the next week and everything's changed again you've got to learn coping mechanisms to deal with that influencing skills hugely important you know how you're managing internal relationships and external relationships they're all the same they're just relationships but if you if you can get people to come along with you without having to shout at them that's pretty powerful I mean you need to deal with lots of different kinds of people if you've always been an artist that's great you talk to lots of artists but you kind of got to learn how to negotiate with the coder that's gonna help you do the thing that you really

want to do that's gonna make the difference is gonna make your work fantastic and you know you can go with management skills or leader skills they're two different kind of things you choose whether you want to be a manager you choose whether you want to be a leader but you do need to build those skills dealing with difficult people difficult people are hard they're one of my worst ever times at work was the first time I fired somebody destroyed me got easier after that I'm not certain that's a good thing yeah God a bit dark now so making decisions there's a theory of decision-making called thin slicing thin slicing says that decisions made quickly by an experienced person are generally better than decisions made by the same person after weighing up all the evidence and balancing it out and

arguing out in their heads it's the epitome of the gut instinct now to make that work you have to have those experiences you have to have seen the situations before so if you can start to build those experiences then you're going to be much better at doing that you're going to be much more efficient at it and you don't have to do the agonizing if anybody's interesting that there's a bunch of stuff about thin slicing it's really in its you know it's subconscious processing you know your leads that you need to learn how to analyze the situations you need to build cases you need to build arguments you need to construct them for a variety of different people not just people you know what you're doing people that have no idea what you're doing you need to learn to pitch everybody needs to pitch not just people that are talking to other companies you need to pitch you need to pitch the work that you're doing because you need to tell people how awesome it is you need to recommend the

decisions but again I kind of came back to this you need to learn how to implement your own decisions it's really easy to say you should have done this until the moment where you kind of go oh I have done this and you get it wrong that's okay that's not a bad thing yeah and networking networking within the company most people you know everybody here wants to network so whenever you have a few minutes talk to somebody before you leave here talk to a person that's sitting next to you find out their name you never know might be somebody really cool but working for your networks is very different to that you take a job because it gives you great relationships with talented people and over time those people move into different companies and do different things never piss off people in York company I was lucky enough to work at EA in the the kind of the early 2000s which is the most fantastic network of people scattered all over the industry and very senior positions partially because you

know most people earn quite a lot on share options and were able to make easier choices they all that group of people you know asked asking someone for a favor is actually more powerful than offering someone a favor don't do it the first time you meet somebody that's just creepy so sorry that's just so clay so not everybody comes at the end and asked me for a favor there's a lot of there is research that shows that asking someone for a favor binds them much closer to you than doing something for them that's kind of counterintuitive but it works you know build that group of people the best kind of connections are the people that get things done and what you want to be is one of the people that gets things done that would be great but get to know the people that get things done you know to be honest in a big company there's not always that many people that do get things done don't be an ass

we all know them because we're talking about the power of networks if you're an arse then everybody knows you're an arse and everybody's going to tell everybody else you're an arse it's really difficult to come back I know some people they're actually genuinely nice people but you know they just they messed up and it followed them around for kind of 10 years one one interesting thing beware the whiz kids syndrome so don't just mix with smart young people you need networks of of kind of of other people that have done other things that can open doors that have experience that can do other things and similarly don't not mix with smart young people you know if you're an older person just make sure you're getting some of that energy in your you're seeing different people don't just mix with people like you I've spent too much time talking to games people I've been lucky enough in the last week I was at a think-tank

which was kind of film and government and military and it was wonderful I got to sit talking to the lady that proved that Einstein's theory of gravitational were were gravitational waves was actually correct when einstein himself didn't think it was provable admitting I'm talking to them and then I'm kind of going yeah I make games we make things run around and stuff but yeah still it's awesome I'm gonna start talking about a couple of examples now when I started this session what I was going to do was pick the kind of the great and the good of the games industry and say let's have a look at how they develop their careers and the skills they picked up as it went along it wasn't really working and as I was walking around the show people were seeing my speakers badge and coming up to me what are you talking about and I kind of talked to him like oh oh you know that kind of yeah and they what I'm instead going to talk about is those stories people that came up to me I'm Clive Downey is CMO at unity he was a

rising star EA he was you know he was stratospheric everybody loved him but he was interested in marketing and fairly early on he decided to leave EA and go to Mattel because you know EA was a product led company Mattel as a marketing lead company and he went off he learned a bunch of best practices two years later he went back to EA that set him up if you ask him that was the most important thing he ever did I bumped into a guy yesterday who's in hearten and you know he just come into the games industry but the in the the job that he come into gave him a massive amounts of exposure to loads of different things he got to work in loads of different areas really quickly and so he got up to speed and what the games industry was you know he saw loads of people he interacted loads of people he did loads of different things I'm actually I'm gonna ask for a speaker from the audience so Oliver is one of the smartest people

I've ever worked with he in fact all of us you want to stand up and just share some of your insights thanks Nick that's also a terrible introduction I know did you like it I did thank you you mentioned networking alone can be a role so I spent a decade as a British diplomat and often times got billed because I was young as being the guy leading on innovation and creativity which being in this room is is obviously a bit rich so decided instead to leave for a bit and going to going to improbable where Nick and I met and that was about suddenly being not the guy known for innovation and creativity but the guy arguing for paperwork writing things down and a bit of process which was at times galling but a necessary different experience and Nick also put up their new skills new experiences new abilities new networks from my experience of jumping from academia to

government now into tech each of his jobs may not give you what something some output from all of those four categories so certainly my skills were developed with the British Army missed my abilities were developed in the Foreign Office the experiences I've had that have been much more diverse have been in in this role so in a tech startup learning how to report to people who are much younger than me when I only ever reported to old white men and that's a challenge because they may be phenomenally intelligent but they're often inexperienced and perhaps immature so stuff I took for granted I had to suddenly address similarly the types of experiences that jobs in the Foreign Office prepare you for a wildly different to the experiences in a tech startup say being shot at or blown up in Afghanistan is an episodic trauma it's really for a really short period of time whereas being in a young tech

startup is a persistent low level of constant anxiety and that's something that it's really difficult to learn how to control and you can only really do it with with phenomenal people around you and Nick was certainly one of these strong supporters I mean the interesting is only could always kill you in a room because you cut it are now I had a really hard day and he like yeah when I was in this other job the jeep next to me blew up and everybody died okay yeah that's a bad day Thank You Ollie I my CEO my current company working on this he first of all did an experiential games and he built a team that was used to being able to prototype incredibly fast because that's all he had he took that to then make this new company which is smart toys you know he built a set of experiences that that that made him able to do the next thing so you know a modern career is just a

collection of skills your career lattice is a slightly different way of looking at the career progression but to remind you it's about collecting varieties of experiences it's about picking up and being able to evidence that that kind of wide variety of skills that's about building the useful networks those are the three things so every job that you look at you should be able to tick huge numbers of things in those boxes and I can't not just throw in a couple of random things it's a marathon not a sprint you know you can step sideways you can step down you can do something different you can take a risk most of you in here I've got loads of years to play with unfortunate I'm reaching the stage around counting down the number of games I've got left that's a terrible thing you're kind of I'm less than double digits now you've got to have you know it is about repetition it's about doing things better and better it's not the first time you do something you've got to have endurance you've got to recognize that failure is

learning and then this is this is the one thing if I can ever tell you don't work with it's hard work and they're I mean and so if it isn't working out do a different job as long as you don't do it every six months nobody's going to look at that badly because you're in an interview only kinda go yeah it just wasn't very good so I'm gonna got a couple of minutes left I'm gonna throw it out for questions anybody got any questions or anybody want to share any of their own experiences what they got from a job please served in the United States Army from 2010 right after I graduated high school until 2015 and one of the major one of the major skills I got was not only dealing with people all over the chain of command whether that's an officer or a sergeant that kind of

carried over in the project management and even though I turned that career into being an artist that project management skill carried over and I'm able to run projects from the ground up and that's been pretty beneficial yeah I mean that's that's kind of a great skill and that skill will do whatever whatever job you do that's a great skill to have anybody else got a question I want to throw something out yeah so I'm an academic so much like you having you know that kind of background and I'm struck by your discussion about the career latus about how much that reflects a very traditional liberal arts education and I'm wondering if if you have any comments about that in terms of preparing people for that sort of mentality right in universities or other sorts of higher education so that we don't we all Road people into thinking that it's just the latter now that's an interesting question um not something I particularly thought about but I mean what you want to do is

try and create that kind of lattice structure within the university the project that you're doing getting people jumping between projects taking different roles it's the one time in your life when you you can do that when you're not risking too much by doing that yeah so you always just want to kick people to do something different and if they're doing the same thing again and again just try and stop them but that's a really good question that's really interesting and you're right it is it's a kind of liberal mentality here as well but we're in games in it okay I'll go on I think we've got one time for one more okay yeah when you're about to make a career transition what's the best way to convince other people that you're past skills are transferrable if they're from a different part of the industry that isn't directly up like a ball to the job you're looking for that's a that's a hard one and a lot of cases I've done that within companies so because they have an understanding for you the often they'll let you move around I did that a lot within EA I did

a lot of different things that he a it's actually so it's not just about I mean we're talking about jobs but it's actually bout the other things you're doing around it it's the things you're supporting it's the hobbies that you've got I you know I work with ollie on the near future forum which is give that that's a networking thing but that allows me to take a certain set of skills and it's not necessarily my job that's taken me to the next one it's the other things that I'm doing so you can kind of package it up and do that yeah like you can't you use the other things that you're doing to provide that transition as well okay I wasn't quite certain whether I could get away with the Trump joke so I looked at Trump's career lattice and basically everything always told him how awesome he was there we go about have I got away with it the Trump joke yeah all right all right we'll see T soon is it too soon sorry I'm a brick we're just laughing about bricks it cuz that's hilarious

haha anyway look thank you very much for your time appreciate you coming along please fill in the feedback you got any questions I'm hanging around thank you