GROWING OUR OWN: NZGDA SUBMITS ON THE FUTURE OF WORK-BASED LEARNING
Why New Zealand's fastest-growing creative industry cannot reliably grow its own juniors - and what needs to change
This month NZGDA submitted to the Tertiary Education Commission's consultation on the future network of work-based learning provision. It is one of the most important submissions we have made, because it goes to the heart of a problem every studio in the country knows: we are growing fast, but we cannot reliably grow our own juniors.
THE PARADOX
On paper, our industry is booming. New Zealand game studios generated $759 million in revenue and 1,418 full-time jobs in 2025, up 29 percent year-on-year, with 97 percent of income coming from exports. Yet aggregate growth is not translating into entry-level opportunity. Graduates made up just 25 percent of all new hires in the last financial year, and most studios take on no juniors at all.
The reason is structural. There is effectively no dedicated work-based qualification for game development in New Zealand - no apprenticeship or traineeship pathway where someone learns while employed in a studio. Our workforce is almost entirely trained through campus-based study, and the skills that actually make people job-ready are developed through on-the-job learning that studios fund and deliver themselves, informally and unfunded. That model is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
THREE PRESSURES ON THE ENTRY RUNG
Our submission identifies three forces squeezing the entry pathway at once.
Mentor capacity is the binding constraint. Studios run lean, and the senior developer time needed to mentor an intern or trainee is a real production cost. With no funding support for placements, the maths simply does not work for most studios.
Generative AI is eroding the bottom rung. The tasks juniors historically learned on - boilerplate code, QA, documentation, placeholder assets - are increasingly done by AI. International data shows entry-level employment falling at AI-adopting firms, and 70 percent of hiring managers say AI can do the work of interns. This compounds the mentor squeeze: seniors now spend more time reviewing AI output, leaving even less time to teach.
Funding is aimed at study or at studios, not at placements. Apprenticeship Boost excludes IT occupations, Fees-Free ends after 2026, and while the Game Development Sector Rebate has driven a 20 percent-plus rise in onshore roles, it attaches no training obligation. There is no funded mechanism that specifically supports a studio to host and mentor a trainee.
If AI removes intern-level tasks and no work-based pathway replaces them, today's missing juniors become tomorrow's missing seniors. Protecting the entry pathway is not just a labour-market issue - it is how the industry grows its next generation of leads and experts.
WHAT IS ALREADY WORKING
This is not a story of failure. PikPok and CerebralFix run genuine graduate pathways, with PikPok contributing to Game On, the Pacific career pathways programme run with the Ministry for Pacific Peoples, whose first cohort started in July 2026. The Media Design School produces genuinely job-ready graduates through studio-simulation capstones. CODE demonstrates what a school-tertiary-industry pipeline looks like, and the GDSR shows that targeted government support changes hiring behaviour.
The ingredients exist. What is missing is a system that connects them.
WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR
Our submission makes three core asks:
Create work-based games qualifications - employer-deliverable and portfolio-assessed, designed with industry rather than retro-fitted from screen or animation programmes.
Fund the placements, not just the study - a game-specific, subsidised internship and traineeship scheme that recognises senior mentor time as the scarce resource it is, with low-admin access so small studios can participate.
Adopt a shared, portable skills language - so "job-ready" means the same thing to studios, providers and learners nationwide. We are actively investigating internationally recognised frameworks, including the IGDA Curriculum Framework and the EU-funded GameBadges project, as a basis for provider-neutral skills tooling.
We also want the system designed for the industry we actually have: a distributed, increasingly remote workforce where a learner in any region should be able to train, and deliberate support for the groups our pipeline struggles to reach - school leavers, Maori and Pacific learners, women, who make up around 28 percent of our workforce, and career-changers.
READ THE SUBMISSION
The full submission, including our survey findings from July 2026 and our detailed answers to the TEC's questions, is available here:
If you are a studio, an educator or a policy person and want to talk about building work-based pathways for games, get in touch. This is a system we intend to help design, not just comment on.
