Establishing a learning organisation through the use of serious games: a study of employees' training strategies for digital natives

Abstract

The tremendous development of serious games offers thousands of opportunities to reshape the conventional employee training and learning practices. The emergence of the digital natives, who are the new generation of employees, had been shifting the traditional learning process from in-house training to ubiquitous platforms. The use of serious games is able to motivate digital native in developing their knowledge and skill sets that fit the needs of the organisation. However, the implementation of serious game for employees' training and distributed organisational learning is still in its infancy. Thus, this paper discusses the design of serious games in employees' training and provides theoretical framework for actual implementation of serious game for organisational learning. The design should be focused on the combination of game challenges and meaningful plays. To apply serious game in employees' training, the organisation should deliberately study the game environment, real-world problems and skill sets, employees' cognitive style learning, the use of multisensory interaction and developing game community. The findings suggest current human resource personnel should 'rethink' the existing practices for developing human capitals in an organisation. A modified instructional system design model is introduced with four stages and nine key steps for actual implementation.