More than a decade ago, educational and social impact specialist Jessica Lindl saw how schools weren’t necessarily preparing young people to take advantage of career opportunities. In particular, she saw a lot of people playing video games rather than doing traditional learning — and then failing to take advantage of their video game skills in their careers.
So she began to think of a career life as a video game, and what it would take to get the best outcomes. How would you design an educational system to enable young people to learn durable skills or soft skills through more engaging educational methods. She wrote a book, The Career Game Loop: Learn to Earn in the New Economy, to express how we can all take advantage of a better way to learn and lead our careers.
Lindl has done well with her own career. She is the vice president of ecosystem growth at Unity Technologies, where she leads initiatives that empower millions of learners worldwide to succeed in the new economy. With over two decades of experience at the intersection of technology, education, andworkforce development, Lindl has leveraged game skills to unlock new career pathways for learners of all ages.
Learning the wrong things can be disastrous. Lindl said studies show that half of the people who go to college end up underemployed with their four-year degree, meaning they’re in a job that they didn’t need a degree for in the first place. Another critical fact for job seekers: One last data point is that for every 200 resumes you send out, you’re only getting one job offer, but for every 12 network or informational interviews you have, you get one job offer. It’s the power of your social capital, and helping you build social capital if you don’t have access to it, Lindl said.
She believes careers, including her own, don’t always follow a straight path. They’re full of twists and respawns. Landing a job at Xbox, she reflected in her book, “I got there by being flexible, learning new things, and approaching challenges with the kind of mindset I’d developed through years of gaming—curious, adaptive, and unafraid to take risks.” She also wrote, “One of the most valuable things gaming has taught me is that failure isn’t the end—it’s part of the process.”
Lindl joined Unity, the popular game engine maker, to help lead its educational initiatives to help developers learn not only how to use a game engine but to navigate their careers in a successful way. This kind of learning isn’t about going to a four-year college and getting a static job after that. It’s more about how to go about life-long learning and adapt to the opportunities before you.
Lindl believes we’re still educating kids with an outdated model and system. Instead, we should be reinventing ourselves and our skills. The motivation behind her new book is the more we can share these best practices in an engaging way, uncover and unlock them, the better off everyone will be.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: It’s good to see you getting this done. It’s a big accomplishment, getting a book out. Can you tell me about the origin of the project? I listened to a lot of the podcast, so maybe that’s a good starting point. How did you get that off the ground?
Jessica Lindl: It came about from two separate angles. One is, you may not know this about my background, but I started off my career focusing on education and economic opportunity. My passion has always been more people making more money, put simply. About halfway through my career I realized that the young people I was trying to work with spent way more time playing video games than they did in school. In 2012 I started a company that studied the learning impact of video games. We worked with Stanford Research Institute and ETS validating that. We learned not only that they were learning a ton from video games, but they were learning durable skills, or soft skills, incredibly well compared to traditional methods.
That’s what motivated me to then ultimately come to Unity and build out all of the education work and workforce work. As you know, we’ve scaled that with a little more than a million students a year, as well as half a million adults who are learning and trying to get into the video game industry. We continue to be in awe of how they navigated their careers, and we’re learning a ton from how our customers navigate their own personal careers. Wiley came to us a couple of years ago and asked if I would write a book on the importance of learning throughout your career. I felt that was a tiny bit of a larger story, which is that gamers really get how to navigate all types of careers. If we could just package what we’re learning from their experiences and share with the rest of the world, we could unlock more agency and more opportunity for everybody else who may not want to have a career just in gaming.
GamesBeat: There are multiple messages inside the book, then. Things you can do personally to succeed, but also how certain skills that come from things like gaming can turn out to be useful in the real world. What has to be done to make this all easy to turn into a larger economic engine?
Lindl: The first key message is that we were all raised, and we’re still raising young people today, with an outdated model and an outdated system. Do well in school. You’ll get a great job and live happily ever after. In fact, on average, we’re spending only four years in a specific type of job, and then we move on to completely different jobs. We created that analogy of those four years–they’re almost a core game loop, in a way. If you master the skills of navigating through these job loops, these are the skills that will make you succeed. That’s message number one.
The second was wanting to write a playbook that’s more engaging and empowering for people across any type of industry that centers the motivation for themselves. The tools are here. You are a gamer. Even if you don’t identify as a gamer, you are, because gaming is pervasive in every part of our society now. You have these skills. Just use them in a way that you never thought of, which is in navigating your career.
The third is, we almost co-wrote the book with all these different video games, in a way. There are about 50 different video games we profile, and tons of different participants in the game industry, starting way back with Miyamoto and his career, how he thought he was just going to be developing toys, and it turned into what we know Nintendo as today. And then in the present day, all these different case studies that demonstrate how to apply this core career game loop to your own career.
GamesBeat: How long did it take? When did you get started?
Lindl: The actual writing process took about two years. We gathered all this research, brought together our primary research and a bunch of third-party research and threw it all together to try and understand how to package this in a digestible way. The writing process was almost a research process in itself. We didn’t walk in and say, “This four-year cycle is called a career game loop and here’s what it means.” We went through all our experiences and took a step back for a year. We wrote it almost as a collective. We had a narrative lead, which was critical, who led us through the process, but it was almost written from a bunch of different points of view, so that we could eliminate some bias and try to have a more global perspective, rather than just a Silicon Valley, Bay Area point of view.
GamesBeat: How much of a Unity project was it? What was Unity’s corporate contribution to making this happen? Did you have to tap the company for research?
Lindl: Yes and no. It’s not really about becoming a Unity game developer. It’s not even Amir Satvat’s work, which I love, about how to get a job in gaming. It’s much broader than that. I would say Unity first and foremost was incredibly supportive of it, but it wasn’t taking Unity’s IP and packaging it into a book.
GamesBeat: The social good part, did that stem from this in some way as well? Is that why you wanted to do the book, for the good of helping people figure out what they need to do with their lives?
Lindl: You’re touching on how I’ve used this career game loop at Unity. I have my third totally different job at Unity. But no, this continues to stem from just where I started my career decades ago, which was economic mobility. More people making more money. The more we can share these best practices in an engaging way, uncover and unlock them, the better off everyone will be. That was the motivation. As you can see, it wasn’t totally part of our day jobs, of my day job, to do this.
Gamers sometimes get a bad rap. “They’re just sitting on the couch playing video games.” Playing video games can have real impact in your career if you follow some of the skill sets, if you apply how you play games into your career path. It flips that old narrative on its head.
GamesBeat: I wrote about a startup called Skillprint. They were getting gamer profiles and figuring out what games people were good at, and then correlating that to skills. They were good at solving certain kinds of problems and therefore that led to a certain career choice. I don’t know if they were able to really execute on it, but that was the idea that got them into a lot of research about gamers. How your skills as a gamer translate into or predict what you could be good at in a real job.
There’s a different camp I wanted to ask about as well, though. Peter Thiel is of the opinion that college is so different from the real world that you should skip it. He was paying people not to go to college and figure out other ways to start companies instead. Is that something you’ve looked at, whether you’d give similar advice?
Lindl: We don’t take a strong stance on that, a binary stance. Even at Unity we’ve taken the same approach. If you want to take the time and have the financial resources to do a degree, go for it. If you don’t, here’s our pathways that you can take in two to six months and get a credential to take you into an entry-level job.
We take the same approach with the book. The level-up is that second step in the career game loop. We have this concept called the law of little quests. How are you taking a significant learning competence in an area you want to go into and breaking it down? If you decide you want to go back and get a four-year degree to get up to speed on that, go for it, but here are some important questions to ask yourself before you make that decision. It’s more about going a couple of levels deeper to uncover the “why?” and then help guide you on the right path. There are so many alternatives now.
GamesBeat: What kind of data is really compelling to you when you come to some of these conclusions about the career game loop in general? Are there some things that people don’t know about so much?
Lindl: The college one is important for me. Not just the number of people who go to college, but that half of the people who go to college end up underemployed with their four-year degree, meaning they’re in a job that they didn’t need a degree for in the first place. That was a lot of the motivation. “Let’s understand the choices we’re making.
Another pervasive stat that seems unrelated is that when you’re profiling Gen Z, half of them, when you ask them what they want to be, they say “influencers.” We often only look at the careers that we’re surrounded by, or that are presented to us in our daily lives. In that whole quest phase, that first phase, we want to extend and take the time to explore more opportunities.
Another data point I love, because community is so central in all of this, is the power of weak ties. The further away somebody is from the center of yourself and your network–if you think of yourself at the bull’s-eye, people who are multiple rings away are the ones who are most likely to give you opportunities. Really empowering people and giving the skills in this book on how to network with your weakest ties. How do you network with people you don’t even know to get into information interviews?
One last data point is that for every 200 resumes you send out, you’re only getting one job offer, but for every 12 network or informational interviews you have, you get one job offer. It’s the power of your social capital, and helping you build social capital if you don’t have access to it.
GamesBeat: There are parallels to the very game-specific information that Amir Satvat has. He said that the chance for a college grad to get a job right off the bat in their first year in the game industry was about one in 100. But if they engaged with a lot of his resources, which included talking to people in the industry through the mentorship programs he has, their odds went up to something more like 7%. That correlates to what you were just talking about.
Lindl: Exactly. Amir and I have been going back and forth for the last couple of years. I feel like he’s squarely–he’s providing so much value to people in the game industry. We try to connect with him as much as we can. There are lots of resources that come with the book, and we provided those resources into his community too. But the key message we have to complement his work is that if you’re not going into gaming, you can still apply a lot of these principles outside the game industry, when you’re moving into other industries.
Another data point is that just a little more than half the people we’ve upskilled at Unity over the years actually go into gaming. The rest go outside of gaming. That’s where we’ve been able to see these practices play out in other industries.
GamesBeat: The data he has about people being able to find jobs more easily in adjacent sectors to gaming rather than gaming itself–I think your odds go up to something like 45%. I know there are companies like Duolingo that showed up at GDC with jobs open. They’re not making games, but you might need to know how to use a game engine.
Lindl: I’d differ on whether or not they’re making games.
GamesBeat: It’s an app that’s very game-like. But part of their message is that people can look to them for jobs. There are jobs in related areas. Does your book touch on that as well? If you look at these skills that start with gaming, you have a larger range of opportunities than just the game industry.
Lindl: Very much. The book is not written–we cover the game industry equally to many other types of industries. It’s not even just game development and 3D artwork, which is what we do at Unity. Do you want to be a business development leader? Do you want to be a doctor? There are many different fields where we’re providing anecdotes about how to apply this mindset in all these other industries.
If I were to summarize this, it’s how you take a gamer mindset to your career. Think of your career as a game. Here’s the mindset that you need, which gamers already have, to apply that to your quest for a job and a career. This is where I keep coming back to–for years I’ve had to deal with this “games are bad” thing. When you take a step back, everyone’s a gamer. We all play Wordle in the morning or whatever. You’re applying game theories to your world. How that can help you expand your career is the message that I think parents will want to know. Instead of shaming your kid for playing games, how do you turn this around so that it becomes something beneficial?
GamesBeat: We have a lot of social and educational challenges today. What are you worried about that also compelled you to write this book?
Lindl: I wear a bunch of different hats, so I do quite a bit of work around education and workforce. We’re getting a lot of pickup on this book there, given the disruption that’s happening right now at the government level in their own jobs. People are coming to this area to think more creatively about what they want to do next.
The parts that still concern me are around how to think through navigating your career with AI. Having AI be a key part of how you think about your role changing. Treating yourself like a game designer in your career. How are you designing the job you have now or the job you want next in collaboration with AI? Which emphasizes the importance of durable skills or soft skills. That’s a key thing that I often think about.
The second is that our systems continue to push people in this linear career path or trajectory. The more successful you are in those systems, the more of a shock it is for you when you go into the real world. Obviously I take a lot of cold calls, people wanting to talk to me. The people who are most successful at these prestigious universities in turn have the hardest time getting their heads around how to navigate their careers today. Higher ed becoming more supportive of how to successfully lead people into this new economy and the roles that they’re taking.
This disappearing middle class is the key motivation for me. It’s that simple. More people making more money is what motivates me.
GamesBeat: How do you flip some of that around to where you’re optimistic or hopeful? Where can changing to incorporate more game thinking can lead to better careers for people?
Lindl: First of all, there have never been more types of jobs. There’s not this “be a doctor, be a construction worker, be a teacher” type of tracking. There are tons of different opportunities. Taking the time to explore that, just like you do when you go into an open world and bump around a bit and try to figure out who’s doing what and what it looks like and learn from that, is really encouraging.
I also think the game aspect, which we emphasize a ton in the book, of failure–you heard a lot about that on the podcast. Just getting comfortable with failure. Failure is data and insights. It’s an opportunity to restart and take what you learned and apply it to your next day on the job or your next opportunity. That makes me hopeful, that gaming supports that mindset, as opposed to, “You’re cancelled and you’re out of your career forever.”
GamesBeat: Are there some things besides what you did with Larry Hryb that have you on a bit of a campaign here? I don’t know if it ties into your Unity job, or if it’s more like a promotional campaign for the book.
Lindl: I have tons of speaking engagements. Everything from big conferences around education and employment–you might not be familiar with these, but GSV is one, which has thousands of education leaders and workforce leaders, either at universities or leading major companies. Organizations like Jobs for the Future, which is the primary workforce pathway convening that happens in the United States. Also very traditional institutions who have purchased the book in bulk. I’ll be speaking to their HR leaders. The finance industry. Speaking at universities, speaking at homeless shelters associated with workforce companies. I’m just thinking about the next couple of weeks and the engagements we have. And obviously a lot of social we’ve done across various platforms and community engagements.
The key takeaway for me from my work at Unity is that the biggest asset we have is our community. That community thrives based on the opportunities that we provide for each other. That’s been a key theme in this book, the central role that community plays and the skills you have to have around community engagements to be able to propel your own career forward.
GamesBeat: Was GDC useful to you as far as learning further about all these possibilities on the educational side?
Lindl: GDC for me is always an incredibly warm and fuzzy event. There are tons of students and early career people there compared to other events we have in our industry. We did lots of student hosting, educator hosting events. We had hundreds of people showing up. We were giving talks and trying to gift the book as a thank-you to our community. We’ve learned so much from everyone on this.
But I think my biggest moment was we did an entire day on Friday, the last day, of almost speed dating. It was LinkedIn, resume, and portfolio reviews with hundreds of students coming in across our team. It was such a validating moment to look one-on-one every 15 minutes with these young people and realize how much we can help them, and how critical this message is for them. Not just around the tactical advice, but just, “Look, you can do this. Here are the opportunities in front of you. Here’s how to think about reframing your skills.” Not just for gaming, but for all the industries you can go into. I like to be hands-on with the audience. I’ve learned the most that way, and I feel like I can make the greatest impact there.
GamesBeat: When you think about corporate interests, there’s some good for Unity in trying to help people become more successful in their careers, especially as they’re using game engines. The more successful they are, the more successful Unity is. But also, you’re helping them on the soft side of things. You’re not teaching them how to use an engine. You’re teaching them, once they know how to use the engine, how to go about their careers. That turns into more success in the long run.
Lindl: Exactly. And not even just how to navigate their careers, but how to build the durable skills to navigate their careers. If you’re a great collaborator, if you’re an excellent creative thinker, if you’re strong at communication, those are all things that will make you so much better in the workplace. That’s going to make the companies and commercial entities more successful. I don’t want to pretend that Unity is not going to benefit from this, or that the game industry won’t benefit from this as well. It just raises all boats.
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