Guide to Gamified Learning

A highly interactive, visual and dynamic user experience will engage individuals from the beginning. They need a reason to “keep playing”, and the first impression is important. But every lesson should have engaging elements to sustain the momentum, and motivate individuals to continue.

A flexible architecture that allows for easy and cost-effective tailoring and injection of gamified learning content. Every organization is different, with different terminology, workflows, policies and risks. So, the closer you can match definitions and concepts to your organization’s environment, the more effective the training will be.

A methodology for learning that builds incrementally on skills gained from learning challenges, through exercises and simulations. Employees don’t respond well to being tested when they don’t feel they have the skills yet.

There must be an easy way for people who may not respond well to gamification, or who consider themselves as “non-gamers”, to get through the training as quickly as possible, without regard for scores or leaderboards. Some individuals will have the attitude of, “If I got all of the answers correct, I want to stop.” If you force them to “keep playing”, you will lose their support for the program. But you will likely find that even some people who don’t consider themselves gamers at first often come to appreciate the many benefits of gamified learning for themselves, and even end up near the top of the leaderboard anyway.

Having a way for employees to obtain immediate, relevant feedback when they make a mistake is critical. Employees find it very hard to adjust their behavior when the only indication of their proficiency is from a quiz score at the end of a module. How will they remember which question they got wrong, and why?

Having simulations that represent real-world risks that they might face in the next week, or in 3 months, is one of the most important benefits of gamified learning. Even having faced a threat just once in a realistic training scenario can make it very valuable. But in a gamified learning environment, it is likely that employees will repeat the scenarios they got wrong multiple times, strengthening their proficiency, which is the ultimate goal.

Being able to measure progress and proficiency is essential to knowing if a program is really achieving its goals. An administrative capability for reporting on detailed results and trends is valuable for verifying the skill levels of individuals and groups, in addition to their participation.

People buy into the environment very quickly when they have a chance to choose their own identities. This lets employees remain anonymous on the leaderboard, if they want to. And they can have some fun with their names or avatars, which makes the experience more enjoyable.

Receiving recognition for completion of small challenges is one of the strongest drivers in gamification. You should have ways to provide extrinsic (but not necessarily monetary) rewards within the learning environment, to give people encouragement and confidence in their skills as discrete achievements. Certainly, if rewards of monetary value are available, this can drive behavior as well, but it is relatively uncommon that organizations are actually allowed to provide valuable rewards for training achievements.

Being able to group employees, either for deployment of specific training modules, or for reporting on participation and proficiency, makes managing a gamified learning program very straightforward. You may have a group called “New Employees”, who always need to go through “Acceptable Use” training first, to get them up to speed. Or you may have special content for different groups, depending on their exposure to different types of risks.