I attended the Astro GOInnovate 2014: Mobile Game Conference yesterday in Malaysia Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC), Cyberjaya with my postgraduate students (lecturers from IPTS).
I met some CEOs and bosses of game and animation companies in Klang Valley and discussed about the prospect of our non-education students in the creative industry (games, animation and advertising).
One of the issue I raised was regarding the placement and opportunity for internship / industrial training. There is a misunderstanding among some academics and most students on the expectation of internship. Most bosses do not expect to spend time training interns on core knowledge and skills, instead they expect interns to be workplace-ready; while our students expect to acquire core knowledge and skills associated to their major which they did not acquire from lecturers in the university.
To many Malaysian companies which are barely surviving, every resource they have is essential for production. Thus every works station they setup is definitely meant for 24-hour production cycle, and it is not economical if the workstation was used for training what our students should have learnt in the university. Thus, we should inform our students to stop expecting to learn core knowledge and skills during internship. There are companies which are willing to spare the workstations during night time for interns to do low-value jobs (e.g. clean-up artwork), we should appreciate that and inform our students to get prepared for night-time tasks. Working for long-hours is the norm in creative industry--I remembered working in animation studios for nearly seven days straight without proper sleep, food and bath in order to meet company's deadline.
It is no doubt our responsibility as the students' lecturers to at least introduce to the students most if not all the latest core knowledge and skills practiced in the creative industry. If we thought we might not have the latest core knowledge and skills ourselves, we should at least attend workshop, training or seminar organised by MDec, MCMC, FINAS, National Art Gallery, etc to refresh our knowledge and skills for teaching. For instance, by attending the Astro GOInnovate event, I discovered that apart from Google Play Store and Apple Apps Store, I can publish students' and my apps through more than 900 Apps Stores, including the Astro Go Play in Malaysia now. After learning this latest information, I am going to relate my teaching to this direction to maximize the exposure of our students' work worldwide.
Perhaps we should start to reflect and review the rationale and meaning underlying internship or industrial training practice for our students to better prepare them for the creative industry now.
