So I went to the Connecting Talent in Digital Media event last Friday in Mississauga and had a decent time. I can’t remember how I heard about this event, whether it was forwarded to me or I stumbled upon it via the Twitters, but I’m glad I did. I definitely was a great place to get out and meet some people in the Digital Media industry in Southern Ontario. Like the name implies, I assumed there would be a focus on connecting talent, and while most of the presentations were around that subject, it was more about connecting industry and government, or industry and academia, then B2B. They had the foresight to colour code everyone’s IDs so you knew whether the person you were approaching was from Industry, Government or Academia. I must say as someone from the “Industry” group, I felt a little outnumbered.
I managed to talk to a lot of people at various schools, whether student or faculty, and I did meet a few Government people as well, those with access to some money, but for the most part I felt that the event was less for me than it was for the rest. I met a few great industry people, as well as at least one total douche.
Here’s a hint for networking, when starting a conversation don’t tell the other person god I hope that’s not your company name…oh that’s horrible, I’d hate to get big with a name like that, it’s really bad and no one will like it. Bonus points for also emailing before hand: “Who are you and do you have funding”. That’ll get me your business!
Anyways, It was still great to connect with a lot of people and to open some new doors, although I didn’t really find many people who were actually talent looking for jobs. I attended the breakout session on “Various funding opportunities for industry projects”, it seemed the most relevant to me and I learned a little bit that I didn’t know about the funding available from the government, but it seemed like the majority of it wasn’t really that Digital Media focused, unless it was about hiring academia, which I guess isn’t bad, but I don’t think it was really meant that much for gaming startups. I did hear from an OMDC director about how I could use the Export fund to go to trade conferences, something I didn’t think of previously based on the name, but upon asking her afterward about it, it sounded like it isn’t that easy to get either and her example may have been an extraneous circumstance, much to my chagrin. She did mention though that she was glad there was at least some content producers present, which lead me to believe that perhaps I wasn’t the only one who thought things felt a bit lopsided.
I wish more people stuck around afterward for the networking, but it seemed a lot of people just wanted to get out of there, a few left early or at lunch. The lunch keynote from Deloitte was amazing however, all about the Deloitte predictions and they seemed quite sound! One piece of advice I’d give for the next event would be to add more breaks for networking between speakers. It seemed like everyone at the table was dying to meet and talk to one another, but we didn’t get a chance until lunch when everyone got up and left anyway.
Long story short, great to come out to an event and meet some people, learn some stuff!