By María Carracedo (Fundacion INTRAS
Gamification is a trendy methodology and it is being used in educative environments with the purpose of increasing student engagement and learning by including game-like elements in learning. Nevertheless, it has been seldom applied for job coaching, and never with vulnerable groups with a distance to the labour market due to learning difficulties. But gamification has many benefits for job coaching, and special for those target groups.
People with developmental disabilities, mental health or cognitive problems, generally need a significant amount of time and repetitive practice to master a task because of their difficulty with memory, motivation, and attention. An study published in the scientific magazine Elsevier[1] (Jungmin Kwon and Youngsun Lee) affirms that serious games can be an effective training method for them because games can be played repetitively. “Repetition is one of the most prominent characteristics of gaming. While repetition of a regular task in the real world may not always be interesting, the repetition inherent to games is often enjoyable and motivating. Repetition is known to be the strongest factor influencing memory retention (Hintzman, 1976), making it one of the most important methods for learning among persons with developmental disabilities, who often have short-term and working memory impairments (McCartney, 1987; Turnbull et al., 2012; Vicari, Carlesimo, & Caltagirone, 2008). Persons with developmental disabilities can achieve mastery of tasks through repetition and reduce the short-term cognitive load by automating the skills (Sweller, 2003).”
Through the gamification of the skills training and assessment, final users will take aspects of gaming into non-gaming situations. Gamification involves intentionally integrating rewards, evolving challenges, and rapid feedback into a non-gaming process or task. This new format for life situations tends to then trigger the desire to overcome obstacles, the persistence to keep working until some “finish line” has been reached, and that sense of exhilaration that is only felt when you’ve beaten the odds. In other words: joy.
Games have the effect of producing continued excitement, interest, and optimism despite failure. This motivation is essential for the labour inclusion of vulnerable groups, who use to feel as «not valid» for any job or to quit trying after a failed job interview. Their perspective would change if after every failure, instead of feeling dejected or defeated, they were excited to jump back in and felt confident about the future. What would that do for jobseekers if after making it through the interview but losing out on the job, they immediately felt energized to try again.
[1](2016) Jungmin Kwon, Youngsun Lee. Serious games for the job training of persons with developmental disabilities. https://www.journals.elsevier.com/computers-and-education