More than just fun and games

More than just fun and games

Written by Eric Pulsifer and Tiffany Young Friday, 27 June 2008

ACC provides workforce for the growing game industry

This fall, Austin Community College will begin providing degree programs for video game development through the Game Institute at the Northridge campus.

“What ACC uniquely does, and what community colleges uniquely do, is that they offer up curriculum for higher education study that allows a student to pick a destination toward an industry certification in a number of what I call highly employable areas,” said Raymond Hartfield, co-chair of ACCtion 4 Education. “In this era of workforce readiness, the community college is a vital part of the overall strategy.”

Bob McGoldrick, coordinator for ACC’s High Technology Institute, found a previously ignored area of workforce development when talking to developers from the video game industry. McGoldrick proposed ACC offer classes in video game development and game industry leaders told him they needed a whole program to prepare a workforce.

“I started this a while back not knowing what I was getting into,” McGoldrick said. “I didn’t realize how big the industry was.”

McGoldrick needed teachers and a curriculum to train a skilled workforce for the video game industry, so he formed the ACC Video Game Advisory Board with leaders from the game industry.

“That’s what ACC does really well, is getting people from the industry to come and teach and help put together a curriculum,” said Jason Hughes, president of Steel Penny Games in Northwest Austin.

Now in its fourth year, the Video Game Development Program is moving this fall from its Highland Mall campus to a wing being redeveloped at ACC’s Northridge campus called the Game Institute.

The Game Institute will begin offering associate degrees in art, design and programming. Each degree program will involve a team project near the end of instruction, and a game incubator will allow students, faculty and industry professionals to coordinate on projects together.

In its first semester, the program had just seven courses and about 25 students. This spring it had grown to 18 courses with about 120 students enrolled.

A certificate program will still be offered to students who do not want to get an associate’s degree. The associate degree program will be more in depth than the certificate program. This fall, ACC expects its first students to complete the certificate program.

Mike Midgley, ACC vice president of workforce education and business development, said that the school has always worked with the community to discover and fill the needs of a city’s workforce.

“Community colleges are ordinarily a key component of a workforce development system within a community,” he said. “Austin Community College within our region is the primary trainer and re-trainer of the workforce in this area. Our goal is to meet the needs of the region, so our focus is on really saying, ‘Do our training programs and do the numbers of our students going through those programs, are they meeting the economic development needs of the community?’”

While nursing and healthcare technology will continue to be popular programs leading to in-demand, high-paying jobs, ACC is aiming to provide the needed workers for developing career fields in Central Texas, including film and game development, commercial music management and the hospitality industry.

Midgley said the need for these skilled workers will only continue to expand with advancing technology and that the bulk of jobs available now, both nationally and regionally, require some college.

“It’s a different world than it was a couple of decades ago, and so even traditional jobs that at one point you could learn on the job — it’s very difficult to do that now. You need some level of training,” he said. “The item that you’re working with is much more complex, the way it operates is more complex, and so your interaction with it and the knowledge base you have to have to interact with it is more complex.”