SHI UK delivers a sector-leading esports facility for Barnsley College

Video Transcript: Esports are serious business at Barnsley College

What SHI will do, that they have done, they'll create an environment that is sector-leading that will allow real positive impact in those young people - those individuals - wanting to achieve and be whatever it is they want to be.

The way that we work as a college is all about trying to do the next thing before others do it. So esports, it's a big thing, it's not about playing games; it's about learning the skills that enable our students to develop their whole self, around management, around communication, around problem-solving in a digital environment.

What excites me is the speed of this; it's moving up the gravitational pull that it's having on young people. It has real, real impact on their life, their life chances, their opportunities, through the multiple experiences and relationships that we create as a college.

Having such a good facility means that students are allowed to diversify in what they're wanting to specialize in due to the nature of the course. But the facility means that the students now can not only do well performance wise, but education, it upskills them. It's resulted into better grades, better employment opportunities, and going on to university in high progression.

We really pick and choose who we want to work with. We're able to do that because of the quality of our college experience. And what interested us with SHI was around their passion for difference, their passion for innovation, and their passion for the next generation. So they've invested heavily in time and resources and support for the next thing in esports and around digital.

We've been delivering esports projects in the state since 2016 and now it's great to see how we've taken our expertise across the pond and delivered projects and partnered with leading esports facilities like Barnsley College. We've aligned ourselves with esports industry experts who agree that SHI is supporting Esports the right way in giving students opportunity and helping to line up the appropriate resources to ensure that their program is successful.

The investment that we're making now in the UK and particularly around Esports and our capabilities, such as Nexus, allows us to provide the end-user compute piece that is part of the e-gaming solution, but then we've also got the skills with regards to the networking security, the infrastructure piece that sits around that.

Somebody once said to me we're going to prepare the students for the jobs that are not even there yet, and I used to think to myself "what is that?", "what does that look like?", "what does that mean?". This is the first time I can really see that and it's through the support of SHI; it's through their foresight, through their horizon-scanning that we can allow our learners to be sat on a career journey to help them achieve that in their destination.

The partnership that we're working with SHI is really a testament to the way that we work. It's about opportunities for our students and it's about developing the right product that our students can take with them for the rest of their life.

What SHI will do, they'll create an environment that is world leading, that is sector leading, that will allow real positive impact in those young people, those individuals, wanting to achieve and be whatever it is they want to be.