The 4 key advantages of gamification for training and development

The gamification of corporate training and workplace education is an approach that aims to increase learners’ motivation through improved engagement. It does this by incorporating game mechanics and other game design elements into training environments. Gamification typically takes the form of serious games when applied to workplace training for employees. They are games with a serious purpose at the core of their design, like knowledge acquisition and skill development.

Using games to enhance the learning process is actually more logical than you might initially think, as play is already ingrained both in society and in our psyches. Gamifying training makes people forget (or almost forget) that they are learning, and as such, offers significant advantages over more traditional forms of training content.

What is gamification in training and corporate education?

Gamified training uses elements or mechanisms of play to achieve the objective of making learning more interesting for people. Using play in training and education promotes the memorisation of content, even very complicated content, and helps to put the processes you have studied into practice. Gamification modernises and digitises the approach to learning to make the process more dynamic and engaging, and applies elements from video games like points, badges, and leaderboards. Such features help to leverage psychological motivations like competitiveness and curiosity, and redirect energy and attention to playing through learning content. With careful planning and consideration, you can create a truly original and effective learning game experience to increase engagement levels within your teams across all business functions and subjects.

Gamifying training for employees also gives the benefit of improving the employer brand of your company. Even if that isn’t the main goal, a game creates a more fun and innovative image for your business, which in today’s job market, people respond to. It’s far less common for people to stay with one employer for their whole careers, as climbing the corporate ladder and a job for life have fallen down the hierarchy of needs for job hunters. Almost as important to people today is working for a business whose brand, values, and general approach aligns with those of the employee. Being innovative, future-proof and ethical is almost as attractive as long-term stability. (In short, people today are less likely to want to work on the Death Star, even as a contractor, than they were in a galaxy far, far away.)

The 4 key advantages of gamification in training:

1. Focus on engaging, enjoyable, and interactive learning
2. A more effective learning experience through the repeatability of gamification
3. Give and receive feedback in real-time with serious games
4. Show learners how to put what they have learned into practice

Games in training offer numerous benefits both for learners and instructors. We have put together a list of the 4 key advantages using gamification in this field can bring about.

1. Focus on engaging, enjoyable, and interactive learning

Obviously making all corporate training more fun and engaging is a big tick in the win column for gamification. Engagement is essential to learning as not only do employees retain essential information for longer, but they retain the information in greater detail. Employees are far likelier to commit more of themselves to an entertaining and fun learning programme than they are with more traditional training. Using gamification strengthens the appeal of the learning materials or modules being delivered, and employees are much more motivated to engage with them.

Gamified corporate training can be used by employers to offer learners an immersive, interactive experience which promotes the learning of new knowledge and competencies. Playful elements of training can also be tailor to promote social interactions, group cohesion, and teamwork. It is not always easy to capture the attention of your audience during training, especially if the subject is difficult or new to some employees. Gamification is excellent from this perspective, as online game-based learning means less confident employees won’t be shut out of the learning process. This is in contrast to more traditional forms of corporate training, with a group and an instructor, and a couple of more confident and dominant employees monopolising discussions, and less confident employees fading into the background.

Using games in corporate training and education also affords an environment for your employees where it is okay to make mistakes and learn from them. In a training programme with traditional grading, or even in a group discussion or seminar-type event, the concept of a second chance doesn’t really exist. A lot of such training events can endure a lot of cagey silence as employees are discouraged for fear of looking silly in front of other people. One of the main benefits of play is that even though we may lose, we can always start again. Through serious games, employees are able to practise and replay different modules to learn from their mistakes. This is ultimately how people are able to make progress. Nobody gets everything right the first time of asking. It’s simply not possible.

2. A more effective learning experience through the repeatability of gamification

In the same way that video games are addictive, and see players racking up hours of gameplay, whether it’s a beat ‘em-up, shoot ‘em up, or a role playing game (RPG), it should come as no surprise to see similarities in engagement rates when these game mechanics are applied to corporate training materials.

Learners are more engaged in a stimulating environment than they are in more traditional training where they don’t play such an active role. With more engaging content, they are eager to learn, and are more likely to retain the information you are teaching them by repeating experiences. Gamification is a significant asset which allows learners to be more engaged in exploring and studying educational content, especially in an online training environment that can be played on any modern device. This means they can go through a gamified learning experience at work, or in an allotted training session, but they can also play through the experience on their phone, or even their home computer if they’re so inclined to.

3. Give advice and feedback in real-time with training games

Feedback plays an integral role in learning and development through play. It is a personalised way to connect with the learner, to assess how their training is progressing and give them feedback, and also to get their feedback on the training experience. This allows you to help them progress, but also gives you feedback which, when collected at scale, will allow you to improve your serious game, and more broadly, improve your approach to gamified corporate training.

The power of “positive” feedback to improve engagement and motivation is very important in developing skills and discovering unexpected qualities in workers. For training, feedback can come in many forms. Feedback on gamified experiences can be in the form of validation or rewards such as a badge, a points leaderboard, or verifying they have understood a concept to a satisfactory level with a good grade. You get much more out of learners by sincerely valuing their efforts than by criticising them and focusing on the negative elements.

However, “negative” feedback which is simultaneously constructive, is also necessary to steer learners in the right direction. For example, instead of looking at an employee’s performance on Quiz elements in a learning game and telling them, “You dreadful at applying these soft skills to people management,” you could take the time to identify what sorts of questions they’re getting right, isolate where they’re having difficulty, and say something like, “You’re clearly working hard and understand the theory, but we need to put a bit more focus on applying it to real world people management.”

For an employee or student to really progress, you must make them aware of their potential for improvement, and this is not a bad thing. The whole aim of corporate training is to upskill your employees. They’re not going to know everything all at once. Training is the necessary friction that comes before individual progress, it’s time and resources allocated to improving your personnel, so take advantage of the functionality of online serious games to identify areas that require further improvement and take the necessary stops to ensure they’re acted on. With this concept in mind, your programmes of serious game training should be linked or integrated with any personal development plans you use as part of human resources (HR).

4. Show learners how to put what they have learned into practice

To maintain an employee’s desire to learn, practise, and retain desired skills and knowledge for their roles, your training games need to make the connection between theory and real life. Why are they learning about legislation X, or technique Y, or how to apply soft skills to scenario X? This is perhaps the most helpful feature of gamified corporate training through serious games. They create, if you will, a virtual sandbox in which your employees can apply skills and knowledge to real life situations they might encounter in the course of working in their roles for your company.

A virtual environment, such as one you could create through the content of a customised Quiz, could pose hypothetical challenges they need to overcome, based on historical problems your company’s faced, or fictional examples based on real data from your industry. This allows people to put their learning into practice, and play through the consequences and learn from them. While the serious game for corporate training is just a game, its great value is in providing simulated experience, where there are no financial or legal consequences for making the wrong decision.

But where do you even begin?

Create games for corporate training easily with a gamification platform

You can easily create programmes of game-based learning to train your employees by utilising games creation platforms like Drimify. With access to numerous tried and tested game engines to use as frameworks, you have all the tools at your fingertips to customise gamifed experiences for your employees in minutes. Customising variations of the Quiz allows you to create virtual scenarios through video and written content that can test, inform, and challenge learners to put their training into simulated practice.

The most reliable format to use for the required depth and necessary detail for effective corporate training and education is the Dynamic Path™. This allows you to customise a virtual learning pathway for your employees, which can be made up of customised Quizzes, but also any combination of the game engines within the Drimify catalogue to create multiple levels or modules. This allows you to engage your employees in longer, more interactive courses of learning.

The modern digital tool for training and development

Gamified corporate training ultimately gives you a highly versatile tool for upskilling your employees. Games created on the Drimify gamification platform can be played on any modern device, give real-time data collection through your dashboard, and deliver superior engagement levels among learners, as they become a participatory audience, rather than a passive one.

The Drimify team is made up of gamification experts who can guide you from the initial design to the realisation of your project. Take advantage of our advice to add a fun and engaging new dimension to your training through gamification.

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