Workforce of the Future Events – Ages 15 – 25

It is fair to say that we all care about young people. At The Job Forum we want to assist those thinking ahead to jobs.  We build their awareness about more opportunities for careers they may not have heard about, so they can explore, prepare and help define study pathways that will get them to thriving careers here in the SF Bay Area

In May, The Job Forum gathered a group of experts as a resource to help expand young people’s awareness about the possibilities and connections in the broad range of jobs related to creativity, such as in social media, AI, Gaming, Advertising and User Interface Design fields.

Here are just a few of the career topics and highlights that were discussed.

Gaming: Ben Vu, the CEO of SkyVu, which is a mobile games and animation studio with a product called Battle Bears, which has 40 million downloads.

There are a multitude of different roles in departments within various game companies. It’s important to know, your strengths and what role you might want to play in a game development team. Understand that going into the games industry, is not all fun and games, it is a lot of work. it entails business and art. So that’s the unique thing about games, you’re combining technology, art and business all in one. Within the gaming industry, you have that tech component which opens new possibilities, but also opens  new challenges and the need to keep learning

In a small to medium sized game company studio, you will have the CEO or founder or president at the top, then you have a head of technology, called CTO, Chief Technology Officer.  Then you have a CMO, which is Chief Marketing Officer. Those are the first two leads and then underneath each team, it kind of depends on how they organize; they may organize on a per product basis or per game basis. So you have a product owner or a product manager who writes up all the requirements for all the features for a game. And then those feature requirements go to an in the engineering team. Usually on a game, there’s a senior or lead engineer, and then you have a client engineer who works on the actual app. And if your game is a live service, you would have a backend engineer, lead who handles the back end, which is a server side of things. And then further down, you would have a QA coder who helps fix bugs.

 

AI: Katrina Montinola is with 2GO Advisory Group, a fractional chief tech officer, and a leader in AI implementations.

Everybody feels that in order to get a tech or programming job, or be in AI ,you probably need a degree in computer science. That’s really the traditional beginning. But there are many, many examples of people, who never got their degrees. I think what really matters is how you think, how fast you learn and how well you collaborate, especially nowadays with AI doing a lot of coding, that even makes the other skills you have more important. The best tech professionals are curious, resilient and deeply engaged. They like solving real problems. The tools change all the time; the frameworks change all the time. One of the best things is to be the type of person who doesn’t mind that.  Adaptability is very important. You don’t really build expertise just sitting in a classroom. So if you know, you can code, You know you can build things, you can join a hackathon, you can contribute to open source, you can show what skills you have.

 

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality: Abby Evans, VP of Talent Management at Niantic, a company that makes tools like Morpheus for creating Augmented Reality that transforms real world into stylized 3d new environments.

At Niantic we work on AR and we have an internship program at Niantic. We do use an AI tool to help us match, called Ripple Match. (Ripplematch.com) They do some matching with internships. and I would say for Niantic, most of our early career hiring happens through an internship, so that I highly recommend if you’re if you’re looking to get a job, going down that path and exploring internships and look at the programs for interns which are really quite nice. There are mentors and learning and development opportunities and fun activities, and it’s a great way to get to know different parts of the organization.

Trying out new things is important. here’s a new app that we launched. Anyone can download it here. It’s called scanner verse and with your iPhone, you can scan, you could do a 3d scan of any object, and so we’re looking at ways that we can work with other companies. So we’re just at the very early stages of what we can do with this technology.

 

Social Media and Marketing: Genene Lobo Senior Integrated Marketing Manager at Varo Bank, which is an all-digital bank.

On the marketing side, inside companies, there’ are various roles, such as social media, used to promote a product, and SEO managers, that’s search engine optimization, meaning anything you put into Google search, there are people trying to make sure that you click on their link to read their article. There are roles in Ggowth marketing or acquisition marketers who are the ones who test plans, put advertising money behind the different advertising in order see what works to drive sales. There are email marketers who help get out the email marketing communications, and brand marketing is involved in helping people feel connected to a brand