Useful information
Prime News delivers timely, accurate news and insights on global events, politics, business, and technology
Aamir Satvat today received the first-ever Game Changers Award from The Game Awards for its work finding jobs for people in the games industry through its gaming career resources.
It is a well-deserved recognition at a time when transparency and emotional support are needed to help those who have been affected by unprecedented job losses in the video games sector. No one has done more to help people find employment efficiently than Satvat. It’s nice to see Geoff Keighley, creator of The Game Awards, taking notice, with over 100 million players watching. Satvat is The Game Awards’ first Game Changer.
When I first interviewed Satvat in August 2023, it had helped more than 450 people find jobs through its do-it-yourself job listing service and its LinkedIn resources. Now that the video game industry has seen 34,000 layoffs in the last two and a half years, Satvat has helped almost 3,000 people find work. Making the best use of the personas players already have is the path to balanced growth in gaming.
“You can’t create great games without great people,” Satvat said when accepting the award. To game developers he said, “I see you.”
Much of the unrest began in November 2022, when Meta and other large companies laid off tens of thousands of people. While Satvat was mourning those who received bad news just before the holidays, he spent more free time creating automated spreadsheets and data collection to do something for those people.
“I felt really bad because it was before Thanksgiving, and it was actually before the really big layoffs hit,” Satvat said in our first interview. “We were sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner. And I started hearing about layoffs from friends. And I said this was unacceptable to my wife. And that was kind of the genesis.”
He added: “We see the numbers and sometimes it’s tempting to forget that these are real people. And eventually, as the numbers get higher and higher, you can’t help but pay attention. My friends wanted something that would make their job search easier. I thought, ‘I’m pretty good at Excel macros and web scraping.’ I could write something that does that.’”
Now, Satvat has produced a ton of data about the gaming industry, aggregated from people who have shared their job search efforts with it. He got into gaming himself when he was in his early 30s and, at the time, had real skills with data. He started his community with a resource.
Tens of thousands of gaming job offers
Satvat brings together automatically updated lists of the latest job openings at thousands of gaming companies around the world. He “deleted” the job postings, put them into an easy-to-use Google Sheet, and posted it to his LinkedIn page. Soon, he had hundreds of new job listings and rotated listings that were a month old. Satvat has been able to provide data on age discrimination in games, the time it takes for people to find jobs in games, and even predict when the job market might change.
If we stop and think about it, no one does this except professional job recruiters who get paid handsomely in good times to fill tons of jobs at fast-growing companies. During an economic downturn, no one does this out of the goodness of their heart or for free. This work made Satvat something of a celebrity on LinkedIn, and he was given the honor of “Top Voice” for his contributions in the field of video games. It has gone from about 4,000 followers and friends to more than 100,000.
He thought it could add jobs for people, making it easier to find a job. Turns out this worked.
“I’ve often thought that many of the things that can be most powerful are simple things,” he said. “People design things too much. I realized there are a lot of sites to help people, but there are maybe 100 logins. Or you have to go to a portal and look at databases. I bet you could put in something like Google Sheets and make it easier. People will use it. “That ended up being true.”
In a post, he celebrated by saying: “This is the pinnacle for me. My lifelong aspiration has been to become a trusted member of the gaming community, to have a voice that resonates with people and earns their time and respect.”
Break into games
This worked and took advantage of his skills, but he was completely out of his job. He was in Amazon’s startup division, helping companies with Amazon Web Services in the cloud sales center. He was there four years and had a stint in the games division. At Tencent, he’s starting over, drawing on his background in strategy and business development.
He earned an MBA in graduate school and degrees in politics and engineering. He worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs. He was around 30 years old before breaking into gaming. The new hobby made him think about his own professional goals and he decided to return to the games.
As for the Game Jobs Workbook, he added new pieces to it, like getting people to sign up to be mentors and having 30-minute conversations with people asking for help. Recruiters and hiring managers are proactively contacting Satvat to post jobs. And it has also added a separate network of many people who have volunteered to read resumes and help people improve them.
Source link
