Why Gamification Benefits Your Learning and Development Program

Peter PsichogiosLearning & Development, Recognition & Engagement Leadership

Most people these days have some sort of fitness wearable or app to help motivate them to stay fit.  It’s an awesome way to track your daily movement, challenge friends to fitness competitions and earn rewards for various fitness milestones.

The reason gamification works so well in learning and development situations is the same reason my Apple Watch works well to get me to be more active every day.  It drives fun, friendly competition and motivates me to keep meeting and exceeding my fitness goals.  As it relates to learning, when your talent is highly engaged by using gamification to reward their learning, they can more effectively retain and retrieve that information.

Here are just a few more of the benefits gamification can have for your learning and development program:

  1. Drives healthy competition
  2. Provides feelings of achievement
  3. Rewards exceptional work
  4. Motivates higher levels of performance
  5. Creates long term behavior change
  6. Higher levels of engagement
  7. It’s fun!

Gamification in your learning and development program is a huge benefit to your organization because when your talent can practice, drill and rehearse in a safe environment and are encouraged and rewarded for doing so, they will be more likely to apply the learning to real-life situations on the job.

A few gamification elements you can include in your learning and development program include, points, rewards, badges, and leaderboards.

We’re excited to announce that GES has some new gamification features launching in 2017 in our Engagement and Learning portals! Subscribe to the blog to stay updated on these announcements.  Find out more about how to implement gamification in your Engagement and Learning and Development programs by contacting us for a demo of our learning solutions to see gamification in action.