Gamification has proven to be one of the strongest weapons of adult learning. Gamification doesn’t just make learning fun and more engaging, it also makes it pretty faster and more effective as the learners show signs of better knowledge retention.
The best way to actually gamify your training courses is through reward-based modules, quizzes, scoreboards, and badges without investing too much unnecessary time and money. You can also take the help of a learning management system. However, you must also make sure that your training content is optimized for gamification, and to do that, you will need an authoring tool.
Fortunately, even top tools like Adobe Captivate are really affordable. Adobe captivates pricing structures make the tool accessible even to small businesses. These can be used to create interesting and authentic gamified versions of your corporate training courses.
To create the best-gamified module, only the tools are not enough. The next thing you need is a tried and tested plan using which you can gamify your training. So, here’s how to get started with the incorporation of gamification into your corporate training.
Table of Contents
Listing out your purposes and objectives
Only gamifying your corporate training courses because it’s fun doesn’t anyway sound like a very good explanation. Thus, just having gamified modules for the sake of it doesn’t really benefit anyone. Gamification of training without a solid purpose can be a big wastage of time, money, and effort as the program might go directionless and the learners may start feeling lost.
Thus, it is important that before actually getting started with the incorporation, give your learners a sense of purpose and some predefined goals that you are trying to achieve through the training program. This way, they will be able to calculate a bigger picture for themselves and work towards it.
Don’t make it a competition
A little competition at work can actually make everyone more productive. But the competition is only beneficial when it is healthy. The moment it becomes unhealthy and the learners start becoming jealous of each other’s progress, dishonesty and chaos creep in. Help your learners understand that gamification is just to help them learn in easier and more engaging ways and not actually to breed unhealthy competitiveness in the workplace. Use the momentary, healthy competition only as a tool to encourage your employees to take your courses, learn new skills, and grow as professionals.
Making a solid plan
Just like listing your purposes and business goals in the initial phase, making a solid plan in which you will be incorporating gamification into your training program is important for maintaining a direction for the training program. Decide and plan where and how to incorporate gamification along with understanding the fact that this is not just for fun but it is to actually help learners learn in better and easier ways.
Making the plan can be a bit difficult as it can get a bit tricky to incorporate gamification in corporate training while making sure that doesn’t lose its seriousness and the actual ‘learning part’ stays intact.
Incorporating a good reward system
Rewards are important in gamification as these rewards work as a source of motivation to take part in such training programs. So in order to give our learners the best learning experience, incorporating a good reward system is necessary.
However, it is always very important to have sensible and relevant rewards. When it comes to adult learning, childish rewards are an obvious no-no. The best way to design an appropriate reward system is by understanding the needs of your learners and giving out something that truly will help them fulfill some parts of those needs for example; a little bit of monetary reward in direct or indirect forms can help people sustain a little better; increasing their loyalty towards the training program.
Conclusion
Gamification is a very powerful tool when it is used well. To incorporate it well and use it to its full potential, there are some specific steps that can be followed as a basic plan. The steps include listing objectives, clearing out the purpose of the training, extensive planning, and building up a good rewarding system. Will a well-planned gamification strategy, learning becomes fun while knowledge retention is increased enough to enable learners to learn faster.
