Upskilling can have tremendous benefits for both the success of your studio and your team’s job satisfaction and overall happiness. So it was brilliant to be able to welcome Jenny Muhlwa – Sumo Group’s Head of Learning & Development – to the Tentacle Zone to share her insights on the topic.

After taking us through her thoughts around continuous learning and learning cultures, Jenny highlighted what she considers to be the biggest thing that can help studios upskill: creating a system for shared knowledge. This system can be as simple or in-depth as you want, ranging from a Word doc through to a comprehensive Slack workspace with multiple channels.

Whatever format you choose for your system, it should meet a few simple guidelines:

• Make it easy to reference.
• Let everyone share.
• Have a curator or curation system.
• Have a FAQ channel.

Say your system is up and running, what’s next? Jenny went on to give us a few ideas about how to accelerate learning in our studios:

• Company conference – Particularly relevant if you’re part of a large studio or group of studios.
• Learning days – Look for opportunities in your production schedule that will allow you to slot these in.
• Innovation days – Encourage your teams to come up with bold ideas, sky’s the limit!
• Co-learning – How have your teams been progressing this month? Are there things that they can share with each other – challenges and solutions, working methods etc – that could help the whole studio?

Thank you to Jenny for joining us this week. Upskilling is a fascinating subject and one that should be high on the agenda for all game dev studios no matter their size. If you or your team are interested in talks like Jenny’s then why not join us at the Tentacle Zone? We have office space available in central London that includes free parking, regular in-person events and the opportunity to network with your peers.

Head over to our workspace page to find out more and if you have questions all you have to do is get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!