Gamification – an elearning trend which took the industry by storm over the past couple of years.

So, why should you include it in your corporate training strategy? Can gamification elevate your learners and motivate them to learn more and will it change the future of corporate training?

Corporate training

Corporate training today, can be a mundane exercise; for both learners and learning managers. Training lacks excitement, and is stuck in a cycle of basic classroom learning. However, with gamification becoming a champion for more and more learning and development strategies, corporate training could really benefit from it.

What is gamification?

Gamification takes on game inspired elements to learning, to create a more engaging and motivating learning environment. These gaming inspired elements include leaderboards, rewards, badges and the space to fail and try again. With all of these aspects put into learning, not only does learning become more engaging, but it motivates the learner to want to achieve more each time.

Immerse your learners with Near-Life™ Technology

Our technology takes on a gamification approach to immerse learners, to take them on a memorable learning journey; promoting behaviour change. Our training uses real filmed scenarios, employees and challenges to put the learner into the training journey. Learners are challenged through branching scenarios, to allow them to see the affect their choices have on the workplace. Whilst learning is a bonus in an environment where you’re allowed to fail, learners also have the opportunity to try again. Our Near-Life™ technology also offers personalised feedback and data to analyse progress and areas of improvement.

Increase employee engagement & motivation

Naturally, gamification boosts engagement and motivation. Game aspects allow us to challenge ourselves, compete, and accomplish goals – a satisfactory feeling that we all enjoy. For learning managers, behaviour change is the end goal – gamification does just that. It’s engaging and motivating nature, makes learners want to progress, imaginably, this would result in desired changes in behaviour.

Make learning interactive

Gamification can be made interactive through quizzes, hotspots and branching scenarios. Again, these all make learning more engaging. Interactivity can make the learner feel a part of their learning journey; putting them into the shoes of a character. This should enable learners to fully understand the effects of behaviours and why they should be utilised on the job.

Easy to absorb learning

As gamification is so engaging, learners have a much better chance of retaining knowledge – what more could a learning manager want? Through interactivity and other aspects such as video, important chunks of information can be easily split for smaller modules. With smaller modules, not only does knowledge retention improve but they are more object driven, for a higher impact.

Challenge your learners

Gamification is the perfect way to bring healthy competition into the workplace. Whilst having quizzes throughout your modules is more engaging, leaderboards can make learning more ‘fun’. This gives learners the opportunity to compete against one another; another great way to boost motivation. Quizzes and videos can also present real life work challenges to learners, to test their understanding of certain behaviours and protocols.

Provide a learning culture

Gamification is a great way to build up culture in the workplace. With its natural competition, gamification brings healthy competition – bringing teams together and against one another. Additionally, with it being a more enjoyable way to learn, it breaks the usual culture and cycle of ‘boring’ training sessions.

Provide data analytics for the future

Including challenges and leaderboards throughout the learning can provide great insight into behaviour changes. To track the progress of your learners, individual modules can be analysed; this will help learning managers to understand which areas of the learning need further development, and those that don’t. Additionally, by adding in leaderboards, managers will be able to understand the level of each learner for future strategies.

Give learners more control

Whilst gamification can be more enjoyable and engaging than your usual classroom learning, it also gives learners more control. Gamification allows learners to fail and try again in a safe environment; away from the real job. Learners can test and trial ways of achieving more, again a great tool for successful behaviour change.

Should you include gamification in your corporate training strategy?

As you now know, gamification is a tool that every learning manager needs in their toolbox – it creates more engaging learning content and results in higher knowledge retention. Aside from the managers goals, it creates a good company culture and should motivate learners to want to pursue further development in the workplace. For training that can usually be quite mundane, learners will be in for a treat with gamification on the cards.