Session: Training as a Productivity Multiplier
Speaker: Andrew Oliver, CTO, Blitz Games Studios
Training and the games industries. The bigger organizations do have training in place. Smaller, independent companies do not have as much formal training available.
Why bother training?
Industry is maturing
Training is a productivity multiplier
Investing in your people is protecting your biggest investment.
Sources for training:
External
In-house
Conferences – managers and leads get to attend, but programmers, artists, and designers doing line work, not as much.
Look for convergent skills. Some film industry experts have applicable skills, for example.
Hard & Soft skills. Hard skills – content creation. modeling / unit testing / level design. Soft Skills – communication and management
Teamwork is key.
Train your trainers: Training is a skill itself. Send your talent to presentation / facilitation classes so they can communicate/train most effectively.
Andrew then discussed the various art, code, and design disciplines and suggestions for gathering / delivering training for each of them.
Building a solution. Firstly, he says we need commitment from EVERYONE. Logistics can be challenging with schedules. His company has someone in HR who coordinates the sessions and attendance is higher.
Identifying needs and trainers. Project requirements and personal reviews. Train for game generation changes and look to your gurus.
When it comes to delivering training, there are different learning methods. There is instructor-lead training, asynchronous online or more local e-learning modules, and lastly one-on-one training.
Training loop – identify training need.
- Prepare / create modules.
- Deliver modules (moderate the 1st time)
- Assess module results and feedback.
Costs.
- External training is more expensive. Inform your trainer an accurate audience analysis. It will be more effective if they know the knowledge level and culture of their audience.
- Bespoke training is vital to success.
- They used a combination of internal and external training.
- External training cost $2000/day.
- They spent around $7.30/day per person for training.
- Maya slick tips and tricks training example yielded a 22% productivity increase after training.
What didn’t work? Starting the training program before it was ready. Overestimating people’s ability to teach. Using dev staff to coordinate and organize training. Attendance “last minute” drop out rates. Assuming all disciplines would be the same.
Training metrics. Justifying the costs of training. Training ROI. The better trained your staff, the less staff you need and the less management they need, which keeps overhead down. Helps prevent staff from ballooning. There are 6 measures of training provision: 1. Effective – pre and post test comparison, 2. Efficient – re-use of the modules. 3. Applicable – aligned to company objectives. 4. Appropriate- right modules to the right people. Timely – just-in time training (not too soon). This has lead to improved efficiency and productivity, tracked through schedules. Better communication and team cohesion is another tangible benefit they have observed, as well as improved morale – all resulting in better games.
Other benefits are a stronger team structure and better risk management. Training mitigates risk, and leads to taking positive risks.
Note – want to avoid negative training.
Deliver the right training to the right people at the right time.
