The Challenge of Work Experience in Game Development
Work experience is a good way for your people to get a taste of a future job, however doing it for video game development is not that easy. However there are solutions!
On the Challenges
I did my work experience, back in the mists of time, at a friend’s family cafe and ate (a lot) of chocolate cake during that week. I learned how much cake I can eat in a week (a lot) and they learned not to offer free cake to staff so readily. However, if you want to give young people an actual taste of a role as part of work experience and you want that taster to be in video games; sadly there are big challenges. Over the years, time and time again, I’ve been asked if I can do a placement - mostly as part of an official scheme - but also as part of just a way to show the ropes to someone. On the surface this may seem like a simple thing - lots of young people love video games, some of them want to work in video games and so why not get them into the office to work on a game for a bit? They get experience, you get some passionate young person doing some work for free? (Yes, I’ve had it ‘sold’ to me that way!)
(Image - One of my kids playing a retro game, Altered Beast, at an event in Bristol)
Except that it does not quite work that way. There’s a bunch of issues to unpack here. Let us start with the initial practicals:
If you’re working on an unannounced project you may be bound by NDAs and contracts - so anyone working on it may need to sign a bunch of paperwork. I get this might be intimidating for a young person to be given a huge document to read and sign. It might simply not be viable within the project status/agreement.
It might be, at the time you’re asked to do a placement, you’re just not able to accommodate it because thee’s a key deadline like a release approaching. The timing has to be right (as explored more, below)
To work on a game, that person may need access to the various systems - IT, Source Control, chat, documents, cloud etc. There are normally security processes that need to be followed before someone gets access. They then need accounts setting up (email, user etc) and then need to be shown the protocols for using these systems. For an indie this might be a bit easier, but for a large company this is quite a chunk of work before, during and after the placement.
If that young person is under 18 there are often other laws, guidelines and processes that need to be followed. Over the years of running studios I’ve had to engage with Health & Safety inspections of the offices, had parents of the young people come to see the location in advance, had to complete forms and questionnaires about the placement and more (before and after). All of this is also a sizable chunk of work. This can be less onerous if you’re a larger organisation and have someone whose job remit includes this, but if you’re a smaller company and/or indie then this work often falls to you.
Remote working, more common now, is also a mixed bag; they need a PC that can run all the needed software, plus camera and mic and then you’ve got those same IT issues (above) granting someone access into whatever tools are used (Teams, Slack, Discord etc). Plus they are not getting that ‘in office’ experience of travelling to a workplace, being in an office and being around people. On the other hand, it does make it more accessible in terms of geography and the like.
But assuming those can be sorted, then you’ve got the next challenge; what do they do? In the UK most work experience placements are a week long. Sadly it's not a great amount of time to learn much about video game development. Even if you’ve got a young person who knows Unity or Unreal or is good with Photoshop or Maya - it still takes a lot of time to onboard someone into a project, to brief them with a task, get them started and check on progress. Plus time to do the task itself. For the person assigned to support that young person, this can take up a significant amount of time that week (plus prep and tidy-up time). If you’re a small indie and you’ve got only a handful of people on the team - that puts a dent into your schedule.
If the young person does not have these dev skills yet, which is more common in my experience, then doing some actual development is not really a viable option. In my experience, it takes around a year to train a graduate into being a contributing game developer - that is assuming they arrive to work with a good degree in game development or related. As such teaching much development, in a week, for someone without a degree, is simply not viable.
On the Value of placements
This all sounds like the easiest thing to do, as a developer, is not to do them and sadly that is often the outcome. But what is the value? I should note that when we’ve made the efforts to accommodate young people in a placement, the feedback has mostly been great - that for that young person it was a valuable experience that meant a lot to them. You get some positive kudos as a company too, which is nice. If you care about our art, craft and industry (which I do) then paying it forward is a good thing to do, this is one way. Plus it gives the opportunity to have a wide intake that includes people from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds (and I include from working class backgrounds here!) So it clearly has value.
A note to those on the placement side!
If you’re reading because either you’re a school or other educational institution seeking places for your students and/or a parent or that young person seeking a placement - this section is for you! It should be clear reading this that if you’re offered a placement, it represents a considerable amount of time and often cost on behalf of the developer. Reflect that in embracing the opportunity. Make sure people turn up on time, prep the young people to engage with the tasks given, respect that they are often being supported by people giving up their own time on top of the day job to help.
I’ve sadly experienced institutions who don’t understand how much work it takes to offer placements. The worst experience was, in us agreeing to take three students for two weeks. Doing all the prep, setting up test three PCs, test plans, having the pre-placement inspections and so on. Only to have all three quit after the first day because “they only needed to attend the first day for it to count towards the course.” Unsurprisingly, we didn’t work with that institution again.
(Image - Someone playing The Knighting at Day of the Devs, GDC 2025. Photo by me)
On solutions to the challenges
Ok so it is not an easy thing to offer. So what can be done? What we’ve done in the past is:
Focus the week on testing. QA is a key function and all game development involves testing, no matter where you sit in the process; testing your own work, reviewing the work of others or just helping in that final QA push to submission and release. So giving them a taste of testing has value. Give them a test plan; this can be just a list of areas to explore, but also if there are fixed bugs to be verified, that's good testing work right there! To make the IT overhead less, we’ve put the game onto a test device in the office and either printed out or had a PC with simple documents on, for the young person to complete as they work. (Which still needs some training to show them how to report, document and verify bugs.) We later transposed what they’d written into the actual bug tracking system.
This all assumes you have a game in a state that you can have testing on and/or the legal agreements of the development work allow for it. If not then the same testing on an earlier game can be done, with the work plan being verifying community reported bugs. If this is also not possible, then I’ve got that young person to play games that are of interest to us and write up reports on the areas you’re interested in; gameplay, graphics, audio etc. You can also get them to look at player reviews on Steam or the like and give an analysis of sentiment and feedback of players.
But today - and what sparked the topic of this post - was reading on LinkedIn about what Bulkhead are doing to address these challenges;
Every year we are inundated with requests from school age children looking to do work experience with us. Unfortunately we can never accommodate their requests due to the nature of what we do, so this year we came up with another idea ... why don't we open up our studio for a day in the School holidays and we can show people what it takes to make a video game
This is a brilliant idea! Hats off to them! But it has another component to it which is just *chef’s kiss* - adding the universities;
We will have devs from all departments available to talk to students and interactive activities that everyone can get involved with. We have invited 3 local universities with excellent games courses to attend and they will be available to talk about further education.
I’m intrigued to see how this works out? Well I hope!
(Another thing we considered at Bristol Games Hub was running a game jam with developers and young people - which would be fun, but ideally works better with some funding to provide the time and resources needed. You could also do it with physical games being an option, as making card games or board games still teaches valuable skills and has a lower skill barrier to entry.)
Thank you for reading!
P.S. This newsletter is a personal one and is done as a personal project and as such is not affiliated with any company that, in my day job, I work with or partner with. Nor do the views I express necessarily reflect any company that, in my day job, I work with or partner with. More on me here.