Alex Coulson, Managing Director @ National Student Esports

Hi everyone, welcome back to The Graduate Guide. Today we have Alex Culson here, who is the Managing Director of NSE, which stands for National Students Esports. Hi, welcome on the podcast.

Thank you, Marleen. Lovely to be here.

Lovely to be here. Yeah, maybe let's just start with the early days at university. Obviously now, like, you're in sports and esports, but maybe back then you didn't really know what you were going to do and what your career was going to be like. So can you share what were you thinking back then?

I'd like to say I planned it all, but that would not be the case. I wasn't entirely sure. I remember, so I studied English and French at university, which was a follow-on from what I was studying at A-levels. So I was sort of just keeping going. Enjoying those subjects. And then I was looking at advertising a little bit, went to a few graduate intake days and was quite interested in it, but that's only because I was sort of what I knew as a job. Um, and interestingly, I think back then we were all thinking about what the actual jobs were rather than actually thinking about what skills we have. Um, and it's very hard to know a job that you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. So it was, it was a bit antiquated really, I think, thinking, okay, what job could I apply to? But ultimately, um, I really like sport, uh, and I like words, and so I was thinking about how to combine those two. And that sort of, uh, by a sort of roundabout way led me down towards the direction of, um, sports PR. I was considering journalism because I was more familiar with that, because you're a young person, you don't necessarily know about PR, but you know about newspapers back then, you know about website, you know. And so I was thinking, how can I be involved in that? But even at that, that time, which is a little while ago now, I felt like journalism maybe wasn't the sort of the sort of long-term career that it had been in sort of yesteryear. So I focused in on public relations.

Yeah, I think like when you study languages, you have an open field of roles that you could potentially do. What was your first role like working in PR? But was it in sports? What did that sort of involve?

Yeah, so I was lucky to get some work experience which sort of rolled into an internship at a sports marketing agency, and but it was a PR sort of focus communications agency in the sports marketing realm. So obviously sports marketing do wider than just wider marketing disciplines than PR. And at that time it was very entry-level, very basic stuff, but I almost couldn't believe it was a job. My job was the first— the reason I kind of landed with me is because, like I say, I was interested in sports. So I used to read the newspapers in the back pages and I took the tube to my first day and the first job they asked me to do was read the back pages of the newspapers and say what was going on. And I was like, I can't believe this is, this is a job that people would pay you for and want you to do. But it's because they were selling in stories, which means, you know, getting those journalists to write stories about their clients. So they wanted to know what the journalists were writing about regularly. So I had to do a little recap of what was in the news. And from that moment, I was, okay, this, this seems like an interesting field that I want to keep pursuing.

So you were sort of between like the journalists who write opinion articles, and then you have the clients, and your role in PR is to sort of make sure they write positive things, or like advise on what exactly?

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole kind of— within PR itself, there's a whole kind of range of the types of PR you're doing. In sports PR, you can get sort of more crisis comms and corporate comms, but I was doing more kind of consumer-facing things and a lot of working on behalf of sponsors of sporting events. All the brands that attach themselves to big sporting events, um, that's it. They pay some money to attach themselves to those events, or sometimes they're trying to do it by association, and then they activate it further. And that means they're trying to get more people aware of what they're doing in that space. Um, the world that I operated in now has changed hugely with everyone is much more about paid media, influencers, content creators, but traditional PR still exists. And that, yeah, exactly that. Our job, or the agency's job, was to get the journalists to write things that had positive messages and images of whatever the, the client was, whatever the sponsor or the brand were.

And like, obviously now you're much more in the esports type of world, and before it was like more traditional sports. So when did that jump kind of happen, and how do you see these two worlds as being similar but different?

Yeah, so I guess, you know, fast-forwarding through, I spent 10 years working in agencies, always sports marketing agencies, with a sort of comms lead. And then after that, I moved over to, you know, my last job at the agency was effectively running the PR team and being responsible for their time and their team, their time charging out to clients, winning new business. And then I moved over to take over running of a business altogether, not, not my business, but on behalf of the, the founder. And that was like a sort of industry body, so it did news and networking events, big awards shows and everything else like that. And that was all around traditional sport. And that was the first time I ran a, uh, I ran a P&L, so profit and loss, being responsible for the financials of the, of the company. And that, um, was all about traditional sport at that time, esports and gaming. Esports has been going for decades, but about probably 7, 8 years ago, the sport industry started to take a real interest into esports because a lot of traditional sports felt they weren't attracting a youth audience anymore. Were they still relevant for young people? And they looked across and they saw that esports and gaming just had these incredible numbers of young people playing and watching esports. And so basically the sports industry became very interested. How can they have a piece of that? What can they do? So we started, in the business I was running then, we started sort of ingratiating ourselves and making friends friends with the industry, inviting them to our events, to enter our awards, and talk on panels and so on. And then the company I was working at, that's part of a bigger group company, is very entrepreneurial company that likes to sort of support and serve communities and ultimately drive commercial value. And we were interested in esports. We didn't want to try and create an esports team, that requires a lot of funding and it is a high-risk, high-reward. and given our sort of traditional, or sort of rather, our background in serving communities and supporting people, we looked at the grassroots level, and we formed a partnership with an organization called British University and Colleges Sport, who are responsible for traditional sport at university. And effectively, we created a business, NSE, to run inter-university esports competitions and sort of support the community in a much wider way. I was loosely involved at the creation, I was still running the other business. We hired a great team, and a great MD to run that business, and he built the business and the team out. And then when he left, I was speaking to my CEO of the whole group, and, um, long story short, I ended up taking over running, uh, NSE because despite not having huge amounts of esports and gaming knowledge, I wasn't there to do that. We had a great team that had those skills. My job was there to help run the business, which I did have experience doing.

And because, like, in your previous company, you kind of jumped into very like entrepreneurial roles all of a sudden, was that something that happened very naturally for you? Like you developed skills like throughout the 10 years of working in the industry because you didn't have necessarily like a business background in terms of like studying at university?

Yeah, I think, um, being an entrepreneur is huge respect to all entrepreneurs and they sort of, you know, take that risk and take that leap of faith and we need those visionaries and those people out there. It's not a natural step for everyone. For me, I found it really like challenging and refreshing at the same time. It's the navigating of risk. And obviously it's not necessarily my money on the line, but it's my, you know, it's the founders', it's the shareholders' money on the line. And ultimately I want to make sure we do well for our community, for our business, and for the team and for their jobs. I think you learn to be comfortable with risk. And you learn to assess what sort of risks are. There's, you know, for me, stagnating both in your career and/or as a business is not a good thing. So you have to take risks at a time, and there are times in both your career and also in your business journey when those risks are more manageable and maybe have more or less consequences. As you go on, you sort of learn to judge those situations accordingly.

Yeah, I definitely agree. I think like For me as well, entrepreneurship feels exciting and there's new challenges all the time. And I think, especially in creating new movements like NSC, you almost need this entrepreneurial spirit and a fresh mindset to sort of create a bit of change in how things are perceived. Can you explain a little bit what does NSC do as an organization? How do you interact with students considering their audience? Like, what could I get out of— being part of NSE?

Well, hopefully one or two students, maybe more, are kind of familiar with us and play in our tournaments. So NSE, we stands for National Student Esports, but we are kind of the core hero foundation, uh, of what we do is run the British University Esports Championship. So that's the official sort of inter-university tournament, and that follows the sort of Bucks Points model. So we run games across 10+ core titles and affiliate leagues, and all the universities and the teams accrue points with competing in those leagues. They can win the individual tournaments for those particular game titles, and then they accrue all their points, and at the end of the year, we crown one university the esports university of the year. But around, that's the competitive element, but so many more of the community are in and around that space, but they may not actually play for the competitive team. They might be involved as a coach, as a caster, so that's a commentator in esports. They might be just helping organize teams from a social kind of admin point of view, or sometimes they're just casual game players, and we do a lot of activity in our casual gameplay as well. to interact with the students. Um, so that's our kind of core proposition to them, and we're always trying to grow the community as well, um, in all areas, and specific focus on increasing our diversity in a strong, um, area on women and non-binary students. So we've done a lot of work to do that, and there's plenty more work to go, but we're— yeah, we're trying to, you know, we make sure that we're sort of a welcome space that's, that's, um, attractive to all.

Yeah, I think It's so interesting how it's shifted a little bit because I think when I grew up, esports or gaming was very stigmatized. Like, it was kind of for nerds or you didn't really have other hobbies, so you just were spending it in front of the computer, type of. And I think I'm young, so I think for me it's changed because a lot of people around me do gaming and esports. But I'm curious to see what do you sort of feel is the energy around, like, how esports students are perceived? Is it more seen as something that is cool and like socially accepted now than it was like maybe 10 years ago?

Yeah, undoubtedly yes. I think there's— but that said, the stereotypes definitely still exist. There's a real sort of lack of understanding from those that kind of just don't get it. And so, you know, there is a sort of heritage of just boys playing video games in their bedroom, but actually it's a really, really welcoming community, and ultimately it is one community, but in some respects it's lots of little sub-communities, so, and we don't just play competitive games, so, you know, the Animal Crossing community is very different to the Call of Duty community, but altogether they form part of the esports community, and what I, coming from outside of esports and gaming, found really, which I really liked when I first saw it, is actually how they all mix together, so, Because often with esports, you meet for the first time online, potentially, and then you're all interested in about how you play and what game you're playing, not about what trainers you're wearing, what you look like. So sometimes we'll see teams that come to our finals in person, and if you were to see them standing at a bus stop, you might not think they'd know each other. You get the kind of, you know, maybe get the stereotypical kind of more introvert gaming person, or then you get a gamer girl, and then you get someone who's a bit more of a kind of alpha jock, type of character that might turn out for the football team, they're all friends and they're all playing in the same team. And I find that really, really nice to see. And, you know, going to university the first time is a daunting thing for anybody, even if people say it isn't, it is, it's like a new environment. But for someone who's interested in esports and gaming to know that the university they're going to, there's a scene there already, they can probably talk to them online on Discord before they even get there, it's really, really beneficial and helps them through that period, and actually while they're at university as well. I think it's about sort of 82% of our community feel that being part of esports community society at university plays a positive role in maintaining their mental health, and that's, that's really important.

Yeah, I think even though it's digital mostly, probably it's still like an important element, like you feel like you know some people and you belong and you can even make these connections before you even go to university.

So yeah, a lot of it's digital, but events are still very much the pinnacle of esports.

Definitely. So I'm very curious. I know like part of NSE is also trying to destigmatize a little bit how employers feel about students that are passionate about esports. Maybe you can sort of explain it from both ends. If I'm a student that is really into esports, how can I sell my skills to an employer? And on the other end, like, why would an employer in different industries, like I assume more like STEM, tech-based, be interested in like a student that is really good at esports?

Yeah, well, I might actually start the other way around it.

Well, alright.

First of all, the type of students esports and gaming attracts, it does attract a broad breadth of all students, and there's plenty of arts and sort of literary students within the community, but the vast majority are STEM students. I think this year in our survey it was about 68%, but it always hovers around that 70% mark of the community study STEM subjects. About 30%, 28% this year I think it was, study computer science alone. So already gaming and esports attracts a hotbed of sort of STEM talent, and then it's the skill development, and this is the bit that we're really interested in. So some of those skills are like social soft skills, which are the same as whether you're doing in the music society, the drama society, football, whatever, you know, communication, collaboration, all that good stuff. But that helps these younger men and women develop those skills. Then there's a technical skills point of view. So Our students game a lot, about, um, over 70% play more than 25 hours a week, but when they're online, they're very digital natives. They are used to organizing a LAN event, a local area network, plugging all their PCs in together. Quite often they'll do their own digital broadcast, so they're very technically proficient, um, online with PCs and so on. Many of them build their own PCs, so they're, they're good at that sort of area, which is obviously often in demand. And then There's some real strategic skills, so there's some analytical, strategic gameplay that really requires quick thinking, strategy, you know, all these kind of desirable skills and traits that employers look for. Resilience, if you're able to play in combat and communication with teams and in a complex environment. These are all sorts of really amazing traits that they develop. And so, what we're saying, you know, there's a massive, massive global shortfall of STEM talent in the workplace. You can see countless reports. I think it was the UK Commission for Employment and Educational said that about 41% of STEM roles are hard to fill. So these big employers are trying to find these young talented men and women, and then there's really this hotbed of young talented men and women that may not even know who those employers are. What we're also able to do is analyze gameplay of the students, so they can give— effectively plug in their gameplay and it can create a sort of chart, if you like, that showcases, okay, Marlene's played 3,000 hours of League of Legends, and we can see that she's a good resilient thinker with good communication skills and strong strategic analysis based on your gameplay. And that can help showcase your talents and also make the student feel confident about the talents they've got. So, like you said before, there's maybe a sort of stereotypes and misunderstandings around esports and gaming. Now students can feel confident and say, By taking part in esports and gaming at university and more and wider, these are the skills I've developed in a broad range of areas. These are the character traits I have, and that's why they're applicable to me. And ultimately, what we're just trying to do is see how can we connect the employers in any sector. I should really clarify, some of our students want to work in esports and gaming, but the vast majority want to work in any sector, um, a lot in cybersecurity. But frankly, every business out there requires STEM talent. So how can we be the kind of connector between the two?

Yeah, I think like once you are confident that the skills that you have actually matter in whatever industry you decide to go in, I imagine it's a lot easier to then say, okay, like I know how to do XYZ and I can say that directly in an interview. I'm very curious to see like what sort of reactions are you receiving from employers? Do you, would you say people are open-minded to it or like what sort of experiences do you have having to maybe destigmatize it a little bit or like showing why esports students have value? I'm very curious if you have some examples.

Yeah, I mean, you get a full range and it's fair to say that, first of all, it attracts attention because, you know, to my knowledge, there's not many/any other people out there with this kind of approach through esports and gaming for early careers talent. You'll get sometimes in an early careers team, if you're speaking to them, you might get a younger person that is a gamer or was a gamer and they're sort of— we've met people that played in NSC and say, I love this, I can't believe this is now happening, this is great. Or you get sort of older gamers who wish that this thing was around when they were leaving university. You then get the ones often who say, oh, that's interesting because my son, my daughter is always in their bedroom playing this or doing this. So they were excited to know that and see the benefits. And some of them already do see the benefits. They go, "I know my child plays a lot, but I know it's good for them when they do it in this way." And then we do have conversations where you have to sort of, effectively it's an education process and explaining from the beginning what esports is and why it's beneficial. But overall, I think there's a receptive nature and really, you know, whilst obviously we talk a lot about esports and gaming, in this scenario, that's just the vehicle by which this community have come together, it's their passion, and it's helped to elevate their skills. But it's the young men and women and the skills that they have that are most of interest. And once you can start to help employers see that, and see the deep, deep levels of engagement that they have with us, and have with employers and partners that work with us, then the conversation starts to flow quite quickly.

Do you see, like, there being a particular industry that is particularly excited about esports students outside of maybe esports and gaming, naturally, from—

There's a sort of range. I think, you know, there's some really quite sort of STEM-focused sort of energy businesses, cybersecurity, and there's a big correlation between our community and students that study those subjects as well. And also the benefit of our community is that we're, you know, in our core competition we had over 113 universities take part and we have more community activity across the whole of the UK, so we've got a widespread, we're not just in Red Brick, you know, Russell Group universities, so that's attractive to employers. But, you know, there are, there's a whole range. One sort of good case study, the DHL actually used, they're a prominent sponsor of elite esports, but a lot of their campaigns are focused around recruitment, and they are a great example of an employer speaking in a sort of, you know, gamer esports language in a playful tone, but to attract employment for all parts of the DHL business. So they're sort of shining light, but they're few and far between. But I do, I do see that changing.

Yeah, that's cool. I don't know if you know this, but when I was at university, I was doing some applications for consulting roles, and a lot of the companies, I think especially McKinsey at my time, they're shifting their assessments to very game-based, um, things. So I think back in the day you had to do like a business test, more like with some formulas and analytic things you had to do. But now it's really strange things, like very strategic games. And like, as me, someone who's not familiar with like much of the gaming things, it was very strange to say, how is that like assessing my skills? But I think when you do the thing, it's like, okay, no, you have to think super quick and there's like some maths in it and you have to calculate things if they make sense. I think you had to just construct like food chains and food webs with different caloric calculations. And I think like even, yeah, definitely outside of esports and gaming, in assessments and in like job interviews, people are looking at like what is a skill very differently.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And do you, have you noticed that anywhere else? I don't know, I'm just curious in like other fields where like—

There's a whole sort of mini industry of exactly what you're talking about of assessment tools that are sort of gamification. Of assessment tools. And that is a bit of a sort of leveling of the playing field, you know. And there's a sort of, um, you know, constant debate and, you know, how— so where's the limit of the use of a CV? And actually some of these testing tools are better historically, you know. Um, and again, this is quite sort of literal, but the US Army or the US Air Force have used games for years and years. Yeah, there's quite sort of literal, quite more sort of translations of some skills to real life scenarios. And then even going back years and years, you hear stories about, you know, city, city banking firms recruiting people based on while they played poker with the big boss and that sort of thing. And all those things are great. And in the more modern versions, there's some really, really good companies out there doing great things. The difference we think is interesting with our community is that when you're doing one of those tests, often one of the few things can happen. You can basically be so prepped for it, so on the ball that you have a great game and you absolutely play out your socks and you do the game amazingly well and potentially perform above your average. Or it's quite a nerve-wracking situation. This might be more common for many. And they go, oh my God, how can I perform in that sort of scenario? and you just don't do as well as you can because you're sort of feeling the pressure of that situation. But when you're doing it based on gameplay that you've done for hours and hours and hours with your friends, you're not posturing, you're not, you're not trying to do that to win a job. It's a real accurate representation of you as you. So you can really see the skills that you have and maybe the skills you need to develop. And an employer can see that as well. So it's, it's a sort of fair representation without some of that stress or that kind of posturing or presentation of yourself removed. And so that's why we think it's a really interesting space to be working in.

Yeah, I think definitely just as a hobby and something that brings joy, it's like a value in itself, not just always very stress and assessment focused. What sort of do you see as your biggest challenges at the moment? What are some of the main things you want to be working on as NSC, sort of taking it beyond doing competitions to wider things and creating more awareness as a community?

Well, I mean, from a, in the graduate recruitment area that we're working, so that's a part of our business called NSC Careers Boost, and so with NSC Careers Boost, we're trying to really talk to a lot of employers and we're going to a lot of events in that world, which we're newcomers to, and sort of showcase what we're doing, explain that to them to help build that kind of understanding and knowledge of why this community has developed those skills through esports and gaming. And so that's something we're working more and more on. For NSC overall, and the other part of our business, and the tournaments and the community, Majority of our work we do directly, the vast majority directly with the students, so we have a relationship with all the student societies around the whole of the UK, and our League Ops and our community team have great relationships with the wonderful men and women who are running those societies on the ground at campuses. What we're doing as well is talking a lot to the universities, some of whom are really on it and are really committed and are building esports centers and supporting it and really get it, and others who are still a little in the dark and trying to work out what it is and what their role in supporting that community is. But, you know, from a university perspective, we get a massive surge of traffic to our website on sort of A-level results day because students are searching out where it has a good esports university proposition. We know that students are looking for how good their esports proposition is when they're choosing what university to go to. Hopefully they're still choosing their course first. Yeah, but when you think about it, it's the same as whether if you like music, you look for a place that's got music offering or good nightlife, or sports your thing, has it got a good 5G? Hockey pitch or whatever it might be. And if esports and gaming is your thing, then you look for the same corresponding feature. So yeah, it's a big focus on how, how we can help play a small part in improving the infrastructure across the UK so the societies can continue to flourish.

Yeah. So maybe at the universities, when after I've left, I'll see more esports things also pop up.

Yeah, I mean, the centres are more and more growing all the time. Jesus College at Oxford University is the first Oxford college to get one, so consensus sort of tipping point where the other colleges will start to catch up. And it's a real business case for them to do it as well as supporting the students.

Yeah, and I think if one big college or university does it, then it's sort of the FOMO and you think like, I need to like build the same thing.

Very much so.

It's definitely nice. So I mean, from a more personal point of view, and we ask this every guest at the end of the interview, is how do you sort of define your success in this space? I know you've been like in all types of different organizations and now more in the startup world, what do you think has defined like what you deem a successful career?

I guess, you know, elements that for success when you're running a business, there's commercial success, are the finances in a good place? There's societal success, you know, are we creating a positive impact in the society in which we operate? So what are we doing and adding value to the students and their lives while they're at university and beyond? Um, and then also, you know, of the team as well and everyone involved. Are we all kind of happy? And that's a sort of tough triumvirate to go, you know, tough trio to get together and make all work. But I enjoy that, that work. And actually, ultimately, it's one of those where the journey is part of the enjoyment as well. It's the journey is part, a big part of the process, and I enjoy that. So ultimately, for me, if the students are happy, our partners are happy, and the team are happy, and when things are going well, then, then that ultimately will mean that my career is going well as at the same time.

Yeah, amazing. Perfect, then we're going to leave it here. Thank you so much.

No worries.

Um, great.