Not every game dev starts their career in the role they want. Some land in studios that don’t fit. Some take positions because it was the offer on the table at the time. Barbara Dawson has spent three decades watching people build the careers they actually wanted from exactly those starting points — by reshaping the job they had into the on-ramp they needed.
Barbara Dawson has spent close to 30 years across animation and VFX as a Producer, Manager, Recruiter, and Educator. She’s seen what holds teams back from the inside, and what makes them click. As an Expert in Residence at OGDA and an independent consultant offering Contract Recruiting, Project Post Mortems, and Leadership Coaching, she’s the person studios call when they need to turn a fragile crew into a high-functioning one.
How this session will help you
Barbara is structuring her session around seven moves you can run inside the job you currently have, even if it wasn’t your first choice: crafting the role, finding a mentor, mapping a path, identifying your superpower, learning the soft skills nobody trains you on, building connections, and protecting a work-life balance that survives more than one project. Each move comes from the same playbook she runs with the managers she coaches.
Carrying your career foward
A lot of OGDA members are working jobs they didn’t pick, at studios that don’t always know how to hold onto the talent they have. The skills, mentors, and reputation you build inside those jobs are what carry you forward into the next one, and into the one after that. Last month, Morgan Long covered how studios make pricing work; this one covers how to make the job you have now build toward the career you actually want.
A note on the venue
This month’s Level Up Talk is fully remote. Our usual room at Accelerate Okanagan is hosting the Okanagan Angel Summit 2026 Finale on June 4. We’ll be back at our regular venue next month. Good luck to this year’s top five Angel Summit finalists: Bullfinch Earth, Drawbridge, Lyrata, Thermaspire Technologies, and shuriii.
Join remotely on Riverside → (fully online this month)