The “Gamefication” of learning
Dear clients,
LeMaSa as a company feels very strongly about ethical Assessment Centre practices. This means that the guidelines by the Assessment Centre Study Group (ACSG) of South Africa, as well as international standards are followed closely by us when we run Assessment Centres for our clients. We also do extensive academic research to validate our Centres. You can imagine my excitement when I recently received the statistical analysis of some of our results and saw that what we are doing as part for the course has an increased impact on the validity of Centre results! If you are interested in these research studies, please do not hesitate to contact me.
In this edition of the LeMaSa Chronicle we look at the interesting field of gaming as a learning tool, as well as the importance of Analytical Ability in the workplace.
Warm regards
Sandra Schlebusch

Doug Harward, the CEO of Training Industry, wrote in his predictions for 2012 that the old saying that “learning can be fun” is truer today than ever before. According to him the spirit of competition not only makes learning more enjoyable, it increases retention and boosts all important time-to-competency measurements.
He further states that gaming is not just a training phenomenon. It is a social and marketing phenomenon. Organisations of all sorts are discovering innovative ways to use “funware” to influence behaviour. In a 2011 Gartner Research Report, they predicted that by 2015, more than 50% of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify them. Gartner also predicts that within two years, more than 70% of Global 2000 organisations will employ at least one gamified learning application.
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The training industry is transforming standard training programmes into competitive games that can be played real time or asynchronously with participants spread throughout the world. Social media is also driving this trend, as seen by popular games in Facebook, Gowalla, and Foursquare. Most importantly, games incentivise employees to learn and accomplish more skills, which raise competency levels throughout the organisation.
Josh Bersin is of the view that the concepts of “gamification” are now easy to implement. According to h im, rath er than build an entire game, you can “gamify” any learning programme using the well-known techniques of game mechanics (e.g. achievements, points, badges, quests, leader-boards and much more).
In South Africa we seem to be a bit behind in this trend, possibly because of the band-with issues that we have with our telecommunications systems. We should however start to build the gaming concept into our learning frameworks.
Sources:
Josh Bersin, Bersin and Associates, Strategic Human Resources and Talent Management: Predictions for 2012.
Doug Harward, Training Industry, Inc., December 9, 2011
http://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/10-trends-for-2012.aspx