Name of your host: Eric Turmel                Relationship to you: Father

The Interview: (ask your host these questions)

   1. What is your job title?

Live Services Director for Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare.

   2. What is your job description?

Ensure high ability of online services, as well as meeting financial targets for in-game revenue.

   3. What are the duties and/or tasks you perform at your job?

Provide regular reports (through Power Points) on key performance indicators, such as, number of available servers, number of users in a game, or number of spenders. Also define work needed to improve on the key performance indicators and manage the execution of the improvements.

   4. What qualifications do you have for this job in the following areas:

a) training? No formal training. Evolved organically through business needs. Analytics exposure and best practices available

b) education? Bachelor degree in computer science.

c) experience? Relatively new domain with online and software as a service. Business needs drove the need to evolve to stay competitive

d) skills and attributes (personal qualities)? An entrepreneurial mind is useful to be able to experiment and learn from competition. Need to be analytical with numbers.

   5. What are some of the things you like about the job? There are always new challenges to surmount and ways to improve efficiencies of execution.

   6. What are some of the things you dislike about this job? The company politics when needing to align with other departments.

   7. How do you anticipate this job changing in the next 5 years or so? The job, or role, will become more formal in the online service industry where a good technical background and business sense are merged to efficiently run online services that companies rely upon to make money.

 

Student Reflections:

   1. Give three reasons why you would like this job (be specific): 

a) Many positions at EA have a high salary ceiling – I can make good money with a career at EA.

b) EA has locations in many large cities across the world and provide employees with opportunities to

c) There are very good benefits.

   2. Give three reasons why you would not like this job (be specific):

a) I do not want to sit at a desk for a long time period (9am-6pm).

b) I’m not interested in pursuing a career with programming.

c) There are too many meetings.

   3. Is this job for you? Why or why not?

No, because I don’t want a programming job sitting at a desk all day, and I’m not interested in making video games.

   4. Explain the value of the TOKTW experience in relation to your ideas about your post secondary (after high school) plans (education? training? travel? work?).

I learned that the work that my dad does does not interest me and by seeing the other opportunities in his office, I was not very interested in them because a lot of the other jobs require artistic skills that I do not have.

I also learned that most of the jobs at EA require a bachelor’s degree.

 

*For security and confidentiality reasons, in order to protect intellectual properties, I was not allowed to take pictures or videos of the workplace.

The last picture is from – http://www2.ea.com/locations/vancouver