How can Gamified content benefit in-house training and development

It is human nature to be competitive with each other, and as such, in peaceful environments, it is games that give an outlet to this inherent competitiveness. And therefore, even non-game activities when ‘gamified’ tend to generate greater engagement. And corporate training is no exception to this. Let us see in what ways gamification of training content can benefit companies.

Enhances trainee engagement

As mentioned, gamified training modules would ensure a greater engagement among trainees by appealing to their inherent traits of competitiveness. Thus, they would be glued to the training module, and would ensure faster training milestone completion. This is especially true if you reward the best-performing learners with some awards, because the potential of being rewarded for outperforming others is a major motivating factor for humans in general to push themselves towards achieving a goal. In particular, this is applicable to millennial employees, who had exposure to smartphone games during very early years of their life.

Increases Knowledge Retention among Learners

Games help in building the cognitive reserve of the brain by activating the hippocampal area. The hippocampus is responsible for imparting the power to be able to recall past experiences and learning. As a result, gamifying training modules ensures greater retention of what the trainees are expected to learn through the same.

Makes corporate culture more driven and competitive

A dream scenario for company management would be when every employee and ever team tries to perform better than others. And gamifying the training and development (T&D) function goes one step towards increasing the competitiveness among employees. Moreover, this cultural shift will ensure a lot more employees to intrinsically be motivated to work towards the company’s goals. Together, this will extract a greater productivity from the company workforce, which will be reflected in the annual reports.

Better failure response

What happens if you fail to clear a level in a game? You attempt it again, isn’t it? The same way, when you gamify learning, you ensure that employees who fail to complete a training milestone do not get disheartened by the failure but instead, re-attempt it with greater dedication and determination. This resilient attitude does not just help in better learning, but positively reflects on employee performance as a whole, which is the ultimate objective of T&D.

Faster trainee feedback

When the learning process is going to be a competitive exercise, the learners, who would end up being competitors, would want to ensure there are absolutely no hindrances to their learning milestone completion. As a result, they will be encouraged to proactively share feedback for improving the training content and module structure, which will ensure in evolution high quality continuously improving training modules. The above points illustrate the numerous ways in which gamified content can benefit in-house T&D function. In an era of growing competitiveness, it is worthwhile to spend time and effort in gamifying the learning experience of employees. Not only will they participate more keenly in the training exercise, the attitudinal shift that they will experience would end up raising the performance of the company as a whole.