Valve's new Pipeline initiative aims to take inexperienced high school students and turn them into the next generation of game developers.

Ever wanted to work at Valve? If you do, good luck: Valve has had enough success that it typically only hires top-notch talent, leaving younger developers with few options. Valve Pipeline is a new project from the company to help those students who want to make games, but haven't really started their professional journey yet. A handful of teenage students will be working at Valve to create a website for aspiring developers, while learning the ropes of basic development from some of the best in the industry.

Pipeline itself seems to be an online guide to getting into the game development industry. At the bare minimum it will include FAQs and a forum for discussing routes into the industry and how to prepare for a career making games. The twist is that the entire site is being built from the ground up by the very people it's targeting - with some help and mentoring from the staff at Valve, of course. Valve has never spent much effort training industry newcomers, so the project is also an experiment on its part to see just what this younger generation can do.

Creating a website is obviously very different from creating a game, but the skills are worth knowing. Whether Valve decides to expand these efforts in the future will probably depend on the performance of this test run. In the meantime you can follow the team's progress at the Pipeline website.

Source: Valve