XR, which encompasses technologies like virtual, augmented, and immersive realities, has helped transform the world of 3D content into interactive experiences. The emerging digital space—the metaverse—could generate $5 trillion in value by 2030, according to McKinsey, which declared the virtual world “too big for companies to ignore.”
As a result, real-time 3D jobs are among the most in demand within the tech industry. According to Unity’s vice president of Education and Social Impact, Jessica Lindl, demand is 50% higher than traditional IT jobs—adding that salaries for real-time 3D jobs are 60% greater.
While many tech companies are now growing their teams in this space, Unity has been part of the immersive digital world for years. In fact, in 2015, Fortune declared Unity as dominant in the VR space. But the company is perhaps best known in part for its leading role in the video game industry. Its services are utilized by popular franchises such as Among Us and Call of Duty.
With an ever-changing tech industry, training the next generation of experts remains a priority for the company. Unity offers multiple ways for people to get ahead as developers, programmers and artists through programs such as certifications, school partnerships, and even free online pathways to learn game development.
“We want to provide really simple on ramps and pathways that will lead you into entry level jobs so that at any point in your career, you can decide to transfer into the industry,” Lindl says.
Fortune sat down with Lindl to learn more about her view of the future of education in the context of A.I., in-demand skill transformation, and more.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
An evolving landscape
Fortune: What is the current state of education?
Lindl: The 21st century economy is incredibly fluid. We’ve got an average tenure of four years with each employer at this point. So there’s continuous rescaling and upskilling that’s happening. Prior to even the advent of the large language model (LLM) explosion, last year, there were already massive forecasts around the need to continuously upskill and rescale.
The reality is, learning is happening continuously throughout our lifetime, and it’s happening in many different places besides school. One of those places is actually within gaming. So I’ve had the privilege to run a learning game company—prior to this role at Unity that I took on six years ago—and what I learned from that experience was that what players were learning from very well designed games were the exact skills that are required for 21st century careers. So, communication, collaboration, growth, mindset, and flexible thinking.
Fortune: How is Unity addressing the evolving educational and technological landscape?
Lindl: The strategy that we’ve created at Unity is threefold. So the first is if you are privileged enough to be in a four-year degree program, or even in high school, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to become a professional creator further down the road in your career. And we have more than 700,000 students now around the world who are actively learning unity with, you know, either on their own or with their educators with that methodology.
Then the second strategy is really around adults and workforce and reskilling and upskilling. So we want to provide really simple on ramps and pathways that will lead you into entry-level jobs so that at any point in your career, you can decide to transfer into the industry, and that’s where you see learn.Unity, as the platform where we where we have hundreds of thousands of adults who are actively rescaling into these jobs.
And thirdly, both of those strategies really lead into certifications and credentials that are signals to our employers, which are our customers, to be able to use this new talent into their companies. Or oftentimes, we see that this talent is very entrepreneurial, starts their own indie studios, either in gaming, industry, or education or all other areas.
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