Alum Francis Baillet, BSc 92, VP of Corporate Affairs at Ubisoft, will take part in the Concordia President’s Speaker Series on Digital Futures on February 20. | Photo courtesy of Ubisoft
The advice stayed with him as he enrolled in Concordia’s Actuarial Mathematics program, and completed work terms in Montreal and Toronto.
“Those work opportunities were key to the start of my career,” he says. “By the time I started my first full-time job as a pension consultant at Towers Perrin in Montreal in 1992, I knew that the ‘people’ side of things was as interesting to me as the math.”
Following Towers Perrin, Baillet moved up the business-world ladder and eventually became VP of Human Resources and Corporate Affairs at Bell Business Solutions in Montreal.
Discovering the creative side
In 2007, Baillet changed gears when he was hired as VP of Human Resources at Montreal-based Ubisoft, one of the world’s leading creators of interactive entertainment. Baillet’s days were now spent learning how games like Assassin’s Creed go from preliminary design to finished product, a process that can be years in the making. “The software — that is, the development of software — is something I understood backwards and forwards,” he says. “But the creative component was completely new to me.”
Developing a game means assembling a team of artists, designers and programmers in equal measure. “It was the most interesting aspect for me coming in,” he says. “I got to know the people, their crafts and everyone’s impact on the final product.”
Making it easy
Baillet feels his time as VP of Human Resources was essential preparation for his current role as VP of Corporate Affairs. “My job is to make things easy for our developers so they can express their ideas, and also make it easy for the people around us to understand what we do. Today when I interact with government and various institutions, I understand where we are going as a company and where this fits in the Quebec landscape,” he says.
Francis Baillet took part in the panel discussion “International Competition: Why is a company moving to one location rather than another?” hosted by the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations on November 21, 2017. | Photo courtesy: CORIM