Amber has carried out over the years numerous projects with a significant sustainability impact, which cover education, innovation, diversity, and inclusion. All of these initiatives represent who we are and what we stand for.
Learning is one of our core values and is fundamental to us. The growth mindset is a key differentiator for Amber, which motivates us to foster access to multidisciplinary educational resources geared at raising the skill level of our talent and offering learning opportunities to the communities in our broader ecosystem. For this purpose, we have created a program called Amber Academy, which supports employees, aspiring game developers and industry peers.
The trainings we provide to our employees for their development cover a variety of topics, such as culture, learning, and wellbeing, which develop skills on several dimensions, including strategic, human skills, technical skills, and leadership development, all of them being provided and fully covered by the company.
Cultural development is fostered by Culture Workshops, while wellbeing is encouraged through sessions that tackle subjects such as stress management, burnout prevention, and dealing with the realities of war. Several trainings contribute to continuous learning, including Mentorship: A Guide for Busy People, Delegation, #LanguageUpgrade: English and Spanish, Engineering Fundamentals Training, Scrum Master Training, and Train the trainers.
Amber Academy also aims to share its educational resources with the entire gaming industry, from students to peers. Since the program's inception, Amber mentors have delivered crash courses, seminars, and bootcamps for high-school and university students. The project later expanded to include expert webinars for the community at large.
Another initiative that has emerged from our values is Innova, an internal innovation pipeline where we democratize creative ideas so they can bubble up from anywhere within our organization. Finding a way to give our employees the freedom to innovate has always been a core pursuit of our culture because we believe it is meaningful to our teams, partners, and local communities. Supporting Innovative thinking helps push the video game medium and society forward. This program allows the employees of Amber to pitch game ideas to Amber's management, ideas that have the potential to generate successful products. The pitches are evaluated by a panel of culturally and gender diverse Amber leaders, and the top concepts may end up in the full development process when the funding is secured.
In terms of diversity, at Amber, we pride ourselves on being a diverse and inclusive company that embraces talent in all its forms. Gender diversity remains a challenge for the game development industry, with 24% of employees being female worldwide, and around 20% in Europe1. Amber is facing the same gender diversity issue as the entire industry, having a female representation of 24% in Romania and 19% in Mexico. Therefore, promoting women in gaming as well as attracting top female management is one of the priorities of Amber.
In this regard, in 2021, Amber signed the Diversity Charter, an initiative by the European Commission with a local chapter in each EU member country. The adherence represents an actual commitment of the company, to support diversity and inclusion through its activity. Amber was the first Romanian game developer to sign the Charter, a text of seven commitments meant to implement diversity and support organizations in their journey toward increased diversity on a global scale.
By adhering to the Diversity Charter, Amber has pledged to further develop an organizational culture based on mutual respect, recognition, and appreciation of individual differences and talents. The company is committed to applying the principles of equal opportunities and promotion of diversity as much in the organization's decision-making as in its human resource management. In order to reflect the diversity of Romanian society in the workforce and to raise awareness, Amber is actively training and involving management and staff in diversity centered actions.
Amber started the #HerOwnGame social justice campaign to support and encourage young women who wish to pursue a career in the game dev industry. Today, #HerOwnGame is one of Amber's most prominent movements.
This piece is part of a series of articles related to Sustainability at Amber, with the first available HERE. In the coming weeks, we will present our community focus, how we support local and international associations that share our vision.