Revolver

Gaming mad.

As touched upon last week, the gaming industry in Scotland is a lucrative industry and one which should be reinforce with strong PR campaigns to maximise opportunites.

Late last year, it was announced that Scotland’s computer games industry had been boosted by £2.5m of investment from the UK government, which will be used by the specialist centre at Abertay University to help games companies create and develope new projects.

The Scottish government further announced that Scottish-based games developers will receive almost £1m of European money.

In fact, in the first three years, the co-ordinated project aims to create 30 new companies, assist 80 others, stimulate 400 new jobs and build the skills of a further 300 workers.

Speaking ahead of a visit to Abertay, Scottish secretary Jim Murphy said gaming was a multi-billion pound worldwide industry, and he hoped the funding would help UK firms exploit this potential.

Murphy also added that a crucial element would be the deployment of talented students working together with small firms on prototype creation, breaking new ground in on-campus working and industry-ready graduates.

Indeed, which leads me to the upcoming ‘Game In Scotland’ event taking place in Dundee next Saturday. This event is targeted at generating interest in employment opportunities within Scotland’s sizable games development sector and is strengthened by effective digital PR support.

This is hoped to pass on valuable information to would-be game developers and highlight to them the support structures out there to further their career dreams.

Revolver PR has called upon companies to invest in Digital PR training for young entrants to the industry.

Responding to recent calls from industry figures for the range of qualifications available to both aspiring and current public relations practitioners to be more digitally orientated, Scotland’s leading Digital PR agency has challenged communications firms to invest more heavily in training staff on the job. The company, with offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh, believes that organisations must be prepared to put time and resources into providing staff with the support required to get to grips with the digital media.

“While there is a need for existing PR qualifications to encompass digital issues in order to meet the growing demand from agencies for digital PR practitioners, there is a limit to what you can expect such course to achieve. The digital media moves at the speed of light and is in a constant cycle of evolution and change, meaning that formal course materials are at risk of falling out of date before they’ve even been written,” said Revolver PR Managing Director Iain Bruce.

“In our experience new staff benefit far more from on-the-job Digital PR training than they do by following a course-based syllabus. While this requires more time and resources to be focused upon each individual, it’s a process that ultimately produces far greater returns.”

A number of industry commentators have recently stated their belief that young people need to be more digitally oriented in their qualifications in order to meet agencies growing demand for trained digital PR individuals. They suggest that recruitment consultants are now struggling to find suitable candidates and have call for potentials employees to be formally taught the foundations of digital knowledge.

Revolver PR, conversely, calls for employers to invest in youth through a process of in-house digital PR training, whereby employees are given instruction on the job as opposed to studying through external educational institutions.

“There is far too great a number of wasteful media courses out there that do not prepare young people for the future as it is” says Bruce. “On-the-job training is much more beneficial when considering that public relations companies require young individuals who pay attention, are keen to learn and who take direction without hesitance.”

Whilst the benefits of this are disputed somewhat within the industry, Revolver is of the opinion that internal training in digitally enabled public relations consultancy and social media usage benefits the company just as much as the individual.