Truth? Or Myth? Depends on which decade you’re operating in. Not long ago, these statements might have been true, but not any longer. To be sure you’re not April fooling yourself, we invite you to review these statements and see why they should be relegated to the myth category. Myth 1: Our LMS is all we need. Debunked: Over the past decade, many organizations have invested in a learning management system. The thinking was this tool would help employees learn. But the truth is that the LMS has fallen short of meeting expectations. Employees aren’t learning more; they’re not retaining enough knowledge; and they’re not able to apply their learning effectively to the job. From difficulty of use, to lack of social collaboration capability, to outdated methods of delivering learning content and measuring success, there are many reasons why organizations are looking for new options. Myth 2: Breaking learning into bits and pieces means people will never learn the whole story. Debunked: In fact, when done correctly, microlearning is an effective way to deliver short bursts of information that are easy to digest, don’t overwhelm employees and allow them to learn more over time. With the right approach, you can deliver and reinforce learning every day, allowing employees to build knowledge continually and more firmly embed it into long-term memory. For more information, read our Microlearning White Paper. Myth 3: Training starts with content. Debunked: Traditionally, L&D has looked at the subjects employees should know and then has created training content around those subjects. But this approach is all backwards. If learning programs are ever to have a measurable impact, L&D must start with understanding the strategic objectives of the business first. Leaders should then identify the employee job behaviors—that when done consistently—will allow employees to achieve their objectives. Only then should L&D design continuous learning content that addresses specific knowledge and performance needs that will help employees meet those objectives. Myth 4: There’s no way to link training to strategic business results. Debunked: For years, training has been viewed as a "supporting" function and, as such, a cost center. Traditionally, it has also been very difficult for L&D to quantify the results of soft skills—such as decision-making or customer service—in terms of dollars and cents. So L&D focused on the results it could quantify, such as number of courses completed, average test scores, and survey feedback. But the problem is that this data doesn’t showcase how learning impacts the business. Organizations need to know that training has a direct, measurable impact on the bottom line: L&D leaders must generate the right data for decision-making in their own organizations, as well as for other lines of business. And today, new business practices and learning technologies make it much easier to do just that. Check out what Bersin by Deloitte has to say about measuring the impact of learning. Myth 5: Employees will never voluntarily participate in training. Debunked: Training has always been seen as something to be endured, but not enjoyed. But by using effective gamification techniques and microlearning, organizations are finding that employees of all ages, and from all areas of the business, are engaging in learning because they want to. Crowe MacKay enjoys 87% voluntary participation and knowledge retention of up to 90%. Pep Boys has garnered 95% participation resulting in 55% reduction in retail shrink. Myth 6: Playing a game is no way to learn. Debunked: Research shows that gamification has a significant impact on employee engagement, which drives substantial knowledge improvements. The data is very compelling, and well worth a look. Myth 7: One training session is enough on any topic. Debunked: Research has proven that people forget most of what they learn within 30 days of learning it. So unless you can guarantee that your learners will immediately—and over a sustained period—apply what they’re learning, you need to find ways to reinforce learning to ensure the value of your training. Truth: Employee learning is rapidly changing and it can be confusing to separate truth from myth. But don’t be fooled by old thinking. What we once held as truths must be challenged, and new methods of learning must be investigated and embraced to keep organizations moving forward. Have a training myth you’d like to debunk? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. The post Employee training myths you could be "April fooling" yourself about appeared first on Axonify.

I attended the CLO Symposium this week, which shone a spotlight on the struggle L&D leaders face to keep up with modern workplace demands. Conversations highlighted how employee learning needs have become almost unrecognizable from those of just ten years ago. The lightening-fast pace of business, combined with the integration of technology, increased customer demands and the need to support multi-generational workforces, have called attention to the importance of changing the way learning leaders have traditionally approached corporate training. Attendees were keen to find practical ways to address the new needs of businesses and employees alike. They were also passionate about challenging convention and rethinking current approaches. Today’s learning leaders want to build strategies that go beyond simply delivering training and, instead, focus on creating high-performing organizations. But the challenge involves figuring out how to do that, while also finding data to convince the right people in the organization to get on board. A recent report by Aberdeen Group, entitled "From Learning to Knowledge: Best-in-Class Methods for Enabling Employees to Propel the Business Forward," provides research to confirm modern thinking about corporate learning. The report identifies that top-performing companies are changing their learning approaches and focusing on how to help employees build, sustain, share and apply knowledge continually to have a measurable impact on business results. Aberdeen Group benchmarked organizations against several key performance metrics and identified best-in-class performers were achieving overall business results by implementing modern approaches to building employee knowledge. These results include: 15% increase in revenue per full-time equivalent (FTE) 16% increase in customer/patient satisfaction rates/scores 85% of employees rated themselves "highly engaged" Aberdeen then evaluated the key Learning & Development practices that these organizations are leveraging to achieve business results. We’re delighted to share this information with you. Download this comprehensive report and learn: Why traditional corporate training methods aren’t working. What Best-in-Class companies are doing to cater to a mulit-generational workforce. Modern learning methods that best-in-class companies are using that enable a higher degree of employee understanding and performance on the job. Three steps that all organizations should take to improve employee and organizational performance. Are you incorporating any of these best-in-class learning practices in your organization? We’d love to hear what you’re doing in the comments below.

Microlearning is a hot topic right now—and for good reason. Providing solutions that align to the science of learning and fit into employees’ regular workflow should get people plenty excited. But, the reality is, not everyone may share your enthusiasm. After all, microlearning isn’t just about making shorter videos. It represents a fundamental shift in how most organizations have traditionally approached learning. So, in order to get your organization micro-ready, you’ll likely need to do some homework to help people warm up to the idea. Here’s how: 1. Recognize current conventions. Then challenge them. Most people grow up associating learning with dedicated locations and times. We go to school for a regimented day of learning. Then we head to scheduled piano lessons. Now it’s time for homework. This institutional mentality naturally carries over to the workplace, where employees and executives alike, associate learning with a specific place and time. But the fact of the matter is that "Learning doesn’t look like school." (Credit to Jane Bozarth for this seemingly obvious yet wicked smart comment regarding workplace learning). We know that learning is a constant process that doesn’t rely on structure. So, help leaders see this new reality by citing real-life examples. Emphasize that every time you Google or Wikipedia a topic, you learn. This familiar ability to find, consume, and share small pieces of targeted information in a moment of need is actually microlearning in everyday life. So, don’t be afraid to argue that workplace learning should mirror this reality. 2. Be prepared to respond to objections I worked with bite-sized content for several years—before the term "microlearning" was even popularized. It just made sense to deliver small chunks of ongoing reinforcement to employees rather than making them sit in a classroom for a few hours now and then. But, while this was a no-brainer to me, here are some objections I faced when trying to implement it at a previous organization: ● "It’s easier to schedule people for the two hours away from the operation rather than a few minutes every day." ● "Can’t you just put it all together in a longer class so I only have to do it once?" ● "I can’t learn stuff that quickly." ● "How are we going to know people did it if we can’t see them doing it?" ● "I don’t have time to learn today." Be prepared to answer these objections by demonstrating how microlearning, done right, can improve learning results. (Our Microlearning Whitepaper offers some valuable insights). 3. Start a Perception Shift Existing beliefs about learning are extremely difficult to change. After all, we’ve been conditioned to accept the traditional idea of institutional learning since we were 5 years old. So, instead of taking a "cold turkey" approach that demands a switch to microlearning, engage your audience in frank conversations about learning first. Of course, I don’t expect everyone to be as geeky about the science of learning as I am (and maybe you are). But, this process will help you get a better sense of where people stand and allow you to better communicate your point of view. Here are a few steps I have used in the past to start the process of shifting existing perceptions: ● Ask people to Google and share a picture of what learning looks like. Do they come back with institutional images like classrooms or more modern concepts like peer-to-peer conversation and social networking? ● Dedicate a few minutes during your meetings with management to discuss—in layman’s terms—basic principles of modern learning and how they relate to the needs of your employees. ● Share practical examples of learning in context that do not align to an institutional mentality but have delivered real value to the organization (e.g. sharing on your enterprise social network). ● Relate unfamiliar ideas like microlearning to the real-world learning and problem-solving activities we all engage in every day (e.g. using a YouTube video to help fix a broken pipe). To ensure the best possible outcome for any new strategy, it’s important to first assess the playing field and find ways to overcome existing barriers to entry. This is especially true for microlearning as the industry looks to identify best practices and success stories. I hope these tips will help. Are you exploring the idea of microlearning in your organization? How do you think it aligns to your audience’s perception of learning? What can you do to help shift that perception if you believe microlearning can become a valuable part of your learning culture? Check back for future posts that will explore the value of microlearning and how to bring it to life as part of a modern learning and performance ecosystem.

L&D is under increasing pressure to prove the business value of learning: to demonstrate ROI and directly link learning initiatives to improved business performance. But, up until now, one of L&D’s biggest challenges has been to identify and capture metrics that clearly align learning with bottom-line business impact. Will Big Data be the answer? Many think so. So what is Big Data anyway? Every action we perform using modern technology - from business transactions to social media posts, to information captured by machine sensors or barcode readers - generates incredible volumes of information (Big Data) that can be stored, aggregated and analyzed. There’s no doubt that Big Data has achieved mainstream business adoption.  An IDG study in 2015 revealed that 80% of enterprises and 63% of small businesses had either already deployed or were going to shortly deploy Big Data initiatives. These firms see Big Data as a chance to gain and act on insights quickly to increase market share. It just makes sense that L&D should also seize the opportunity to use Big Data to its advantage. L&D needs to expand its Big Data focus. Historically, L&D has found it difficult to use data to correlate learning to business outcomes. However, this is starting to change. Recent technological developments, such as xAPI (and, quite frankly, sophisticated algorithms in our Axonify Employee Knowledge Platform), are helping learning professionals more quickly and effectively capture and perform analytics with valuable learning and performance data that tie to business results. A study by i4cp found that 22% of organizations with more than 1000 employees are already leveraging learning-related Big Data, while another 39% have Big Data plans for the future. The standard metrics provided by Learning Management Systems—such as assessment scores, training hours completed, survey feedback—might be valuable for running the day-to-day of L&D, but they don’t identify a measurable impact on the organization’s bottom line. Instead, L&D must identify, measure and assess metrics that clearly establish how employees’ knowledge levels impact their ability to improve job performance. This means establishing a measurement strategy to generate data about how employees retain what they learn and effectively apply it to the job.  It means comparing employee knowledge against behaviors (what they do), comparing behaviors against the results they achieve, and comparing their results against business goals. By creating a measurement chain that links knowledge, application and results, you can not only identify learning’s impact on job performance, but aggregate the data and analyze it at the organizational level as well. Is Big Data the key to proving the value of L&D? It certainly holds a lot of promise.  From identifying whether specific learning initiatives have improved performance across the enterprise, to whether an individual was able to improve sales performance due to learning, the right type of Big Data offers the ability to not only inform strategic decisions, but directly align learning to performance. Depending on the data captured and analyzed, we can extract intelligence from the organizational level, right down to the most granular level metrics for individual learners: Why do employees in one location perform better than in others and why? How much did the company save in accident reductions due to new learning initiatives? What percent of improved customer ratings is due to employee knowledge improvements? And we can use the power of predictive analytics to improve our business planning: How long will it take to bring employees to competence on a new product line? What specific learning does this employee need to improve job performance? What type of training content do we need to help prevent specific safety incidents? There’s no doubt Big Data has the opportunity to be a game-changer for L&D. But, for it to be truly valuable, learning metrics must first be clearly aligned to business performance. Stay tuned:  The next post in our continuing discussion on Big Data will provide more concrete examples of analytics and how they can improve job performance as well as L&D’s overall results. Are you using Big Data in your organization to provide more valuable learning insights to the business? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments below.

I attended the CLO Symposium this week, which shone a spotlight on the struggle L&D leaders face to keep up with modern workplace demands. Conversations highlighted how employee learning needs have become almost unrecognizable from those of just ten years ago. The lightening-fast pace of business, combined with the integration of technology, increased customer demands and the need to support multi-generational workforces, have called attention to the importance of changing the way learning leaders have traditionally approached corporate training. Attendees were keen to find practical ways to address the new needs of businesses and employees alike. They were also passionate about challenging convention and rethinking current approaches. Today’s learning leaders want to build strategies that go beyond simply delivering training and, instead, focus on creating high-performing organizations. But the challenge involves figuring out how to do that, while also finding data to convince the right people in the organization to get on board. A recent report by Aberdeen Group, entitled "From Learning to Knowledge: Best-in-Class Methods for Enabling Employees to Propel the Business Forward," provides research to confirm modern thinking about corporate learning. The report identifies that top-performing companies are changing their learning approaches and focusing on how to help employees build, sustain, share and apply knowledge continually to have a measurable impact on business results. Aberdeen Group benchmarked organizations against several key performance metrics and identified best-in-class performers were achieving overall business results by implementing modern approaches to building employee knowledge. These results include: 15% increase in revenue per full-time equivalent (FTE) 16% increase in customer/patient satisfaction rates/scores 85% of employees rated themselves "highly engaged" Aberdeen then evaluated the key Learning & Development practices that these organizations are leveraging to achieve business results. We’re delighted to share this information with you. Download this comprehensive report and learn: Why traditional corporate training methods aren’t working. What Best-in-Class companies are doing to cater to a mulit-generational workforce. Modern learning methods that best-in-class companies are using that enable a higher degree of employee understanding and performance on the job. Three steps that all organizations should take to improve employee and organizational performance. Are you incorporating any of these best-in-class learning practices in your organization? We’d love to hear what you’re doing in the comments below. The post New Research: Best-in-class corporate learning approaches that drive business results appeared first on Axonify.

Microlearning is a hot topic right now—and for good reason. Providing solutions that align to the science of learning and fit into employees’ regular workflow should get people plenty excited. But, the reality is, not everyone may share your enthusiasm. After all, microlearning isn’t just about making shorter videos. It represents a fundamental shift in how most organizations have traditionally approached learning. So, in order to get your organization micro-ready, you’ll likely need to do some homework to help people warm up to the idea. Here’s how: 1. Recognize current conventions. Then challenge them. Most people grow up associating learning with dedicated locations and times. We go to school for a regimented day of learning. Then we head to scheduled piano lessons. Now it’s time for homework. This institutional mentality naturally carries over to the workplace, where employees and executives alike, associate learning with a specific place and time. But the fact of the matter is that "Learning doesn’t look like school." (Credit to Jane Bozarth for this seemingly obvious yet wicked smart comment regarding workplace learning). We know that learning is a constant process that doesn’t rely on structure. So, help leaders see this new reality by citing real-life examples. Emphasize that every time you Google or Wikipedia a topic, you learn. This familiar ability to find, consume, and share small pieces of targeted information in a moment of need is actually microlearning in everyday life. So, don’t be afraid to argue that workplace learning should mirror this reality. 2. Be prepared to respond to objections I worked with bite-sized content for several years—before the term "microlearning" was even popularized. It just made sense to deliver small chunks of ongoing reinforcement to employees rather than making them sit in a classroom for a few hours now and then. But, while this was a no-brainer to me, here are some objections I faced when trying to implement it at a previous organization: ● "It’s easier to schedule people for the two hours away from the operation rather than a few minutes every day." ● "Can’t you just put it all together in a longer class so I only have to do it once?" ● "I can’t learn stuff that quickly." ● "How are we going to know people did it if we can’t see them doing it?" ● "I don’t have time to learn today." Be prepared to answer these objections by demonstrating how microlearning, done right, can improve learning results. (Our Microlearning Whitepaper offers some valuable insights). 3. Start a Perception Shift Existing beliefs about learning are extremely difficult to change. After all, we’ve been conditioned to accept the traditional idea of institutional learning since we were 5 years old. So, instead of taking a "cold turkey" approach that demands a switch to microlearning, engage your audience in frank conversations about learning first. Of course, I don’t expect everyone to be as geeky about the science of learning as I am (and maybe you are). But, this process will help you get a better sense of where people stand and allow you to better communicate your point of view. Here are a few steps I have used in the past to start the process of shifting existing perceptions: ● Ask people to Google and share a picture of what learning looks like. Do they come back with institutional images like classrooms or more modern concepts like peer-to-peer conversation and social networking? ● Dedicate a few minutes during your meetings with management to discuss—in layman’s terms—basic principles of modern learning and how they relate to the needs of your employees. ● Share practical examples of learning in context that do not align to an institutional mentality but have delivered real value to the organization (e.g. sharing on your enterprise social network). ● Relate unfamiliar ideas like microlearning to the real-world learning and problem-solving activities we all engage in every day (e.g. using a YouTube video to help fix a broken pipe). To ensure the best possible outcome for any new strategy, it’s important to first assess the playing field and find ways to overcome existing barriers to entry. This is especially true for microlearning as the industry looks to identify best practices and success stories. I hope these tips will help. Are you exploring the idea of microlearning in your organization? How do you think it aligns to your audience’s perception of learning? What can you do to help shift that perception if you believe microlearning can become a valuable part of your learning culture? Check back for future posts that will explore the value of microlearning and how to bring it to life as part of a modern learning and performance ecosystem. The post Culture before Content: 3 Steps for Warming Up Your Organization to the Idea of Microlearning appeared first on Axonify.

L&D is under increasing pressure to prove the business value of learning: to demonstrate ROI and directly link learning initiatives to improved business performance. But, up until now, one of L&D’s biggest challenges has been to identify and capture metrics that clearly align learning with bottom-line business impact. Will Big Data be the answer? Many think so. So what is Big Data anyway? Every action we perform using modern technology - from business transactions to social media posts, to information captured by machine sensors or barcode readers - generates incredible volumes of information (Big Data) that can be stored, aggregated and analyzed. There’s no doubt that Big Data has achieved mainstream business adoption.  An IDG study in 2015 revealed that 80% of enterprises and 63% of small businesses had either already deployed or were going to shortly deploy Big Data initiatives. These firms see Big Data as a chance to gain and act on insights quickly to increase market share. It just makes sense that L&D should also seize the opportunity to use Big Data to its advantage. L&D needs to expand its Big Data focus. Historically, L&D has found it difficult to use data to correlate learning to business outcomes. However, this is starting to change. Recent technological developments, such as xAPI (and, quite frankly, sophisticated algorithms in our Axonify Employee Knowledge Platform), are helping learning professionals more quickly and effectively capture and perform analytics with valuable learning and performance data that tie to business results. A study by i4cp found that 22% of organizations with more than 1000 employees are already leveraging learning-related Big Data, while another 39% have Big Data plans for the future. The standard metrics provided by Learning Management Systems—such as assessment scores, training hours completed, survey feedback—might be valuable for running the day-to-day of L&D, but they don’t identify a measurable impact on the organization’s bottom line. Instead, L&D must identify, measure and assess metrics that clearly establish how employees’ knowledge levels impact their ability to improve job performance. This means establishing a measurement strategy to generate data about how employees retain what they learn and effectively apply it to the job.  It means comparing employee knowledge against behaviors (what they do), comparing behaviors against the results they achieve, and comparing their results against business goals. By creating a measurement chain that links knowledge, application and results, you can not only identify learning’s impact on job performance, but aggregate the data and analyze it at the organizational level as well. Is Big Data the key to proving the value of L&D? It certainly holds a lot of promise.  From identifying whether specific learning initiatives have improved performance across the enterprise, to whether an individual was able to improve sales performance due to learning, the right type of Big Data offers the ability to not only inform strategic decisions, but directly align learning to performance. Depending on the data captured and analyzed, we can extract intelligence from the organizational level, right down to the most granular level metrics for individual learners: Why do employees in one location perform better than in others and why? How much did the company save in accident reductions due to new learning initiatives? What percent of improved customer ratings is due to employee knowledge improvements? And we can use the power of predictive analytics to improve our business planning: How long will it take to bring employees to competence on a new product line? What specific learning does this employee need to improve job performance? What type of training content do we need to help prevent specific safety incidents? There’s no doubt Big Data has the opportunity to be a game-changer for L&D. But, for it to be truly valuable, learning metrics must first be clearly aligned to business performance. Stay tuned:  The next post in our continuing discussion on Big Data will provide more concrete examples of analytics and how they can improve job performance as well as L&D’s overall results. Are you using Big Data in your organization to provide more valuable learning insights to the business? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments below. The post Is Big Data a Game-Changer for L&D? appeared first on Axonify.

8 must-haves every organization needs to be successful with Microlearning. When Microlearning is delivered in a consistent, ongoing way, you have the ability to drive continuous learning, build up knowledge over time, and produce real behavior change that results in improved job performance. This whitepaper takes a comprehensive look at Microlearning and outlines what’s required for making it a reality in your organization. Here’s a peek at what’s included inside: >> Why Microlearning is essential in today’s business environment. Discover why an increasing rate of change and growing demand for employee knowledge lend themselves perfectly to a Microlearning strategy. >> 8 components of an ideal Microlearning platform. Beyond just being able to deliver content in small chunks, what other features are essential for driving impact? Find out. >> Examples of Microlearning in action. Discover four stories of how global organizations from around the world are leveraging Microlearning to drive business results. >> … and lots more. Get your copy today. The post Microlearning: Small Bites, Big Impact appeared first on Axonify.

If you haven’t noticed, Axonify.com just got a facelift! (Well, okay. It’s more like a complete body makeover).   But rest assured, we’re not just about looks, we’re about substance too. So, we wanted to let you in on 5 ways our new website will assist you with building corporate knowledge to boost organizational performance and results: 1. Get answers to top corporate learning challenges at rocket speed: Modernize Corporate Learning Build Employee Knowledge Retain with Microlearning Engage with Gamification Prove Business Impact   2. Prove the value of modernizing your approach to corporate learning with complimentary resources: From Learning to Knowledge: Best-in-class Methods for Enabling Employees to Propel the Business Forward Microlearning: Small Bites, Big Impact When The LMS Isn’t Enough Measuring Impact Gamification and Your Enterprise Learning Strategy   3. Inspire your organization to do things differently by sharing incredible stories from Axonified customers: Customers tout the benefits of Axonify Bloomingdale’s saves millions by investing in associate knowledge-building Walmart achieves unprecedented safety results by building employee knowledge and translating it into job action Ethicon boosts selling power by keeping daily pulse on medical reps’ expertise   4. Understand how Axonify works across different industries and applications: Retail Workplace Safety Professional Sales Call Centers Finance & Insurance   5. Learn more about what the Axonify Employee Knowledge Platform offers: Axonify Platform Overview Axonify LearnerZone Axonify LeaderZone Axonify ImpactZone Axonify DiscoveryZone Axonify AdminZone Axonify Mobile Axonify Personalized and Adaptive Learning Technology   So, check it out! We’d love to know what you think. And don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or would like more information. The post Top 5 reasons why you need to check out the NEW Axonify.com appeared first on Axonify.

I’m CONSTANTLY curating online content about learning and performance. As a learning geek, It’s my thing—well—one of my things. Every month, I’ll dig through my collections and share my favorite articles on a particular theme along with a few insights of my own. This month, I found some really interesting stuff about gamification. Gamification works—if done well. At Axonify, we’ve witnessed the power of gamification in learning through the continued real-world success of our customers and partners. It may have been heavily dismissed as a trend just a few years ago, but gamification is definitely gaining validation as organizations get past the hype and apply the concept to solve real-world problems, like employee engagement and motivation to learn. Here are my curated insights on gamification for April 2016: Find your personal gamification guru from Sponge UK This is a curated list IN a curated list. How meta! A big part of getting past the hype and finding the value in a new concept is figuring out who to listen to along the way. The Sponge UK team has pulled together an awesome list of gaming experts in this post. While I don’t know everyone on this list personally, I can validate the big pile of gaming knowledge that lives in these people’s minds. Karl Kapp and Gabe Zichermann specifically have informed my work with gamification for several years. The list also provides suggested readings, videos, podcasts and social networking contacts for each SME. If you want to learn more about how games and gamification can support workplace learning and engagement, this list is a great place to start (in addition to info from Axonify, of course). Gamer Motivation Profile Findings - #GamesUR US Conference 2016 from Nick Yee Warning! Psychology ahead! In this 30-minute recorded presentation on YouTube, Nick Yee reveals insight from research his team conducted into the psychology of gaming motivation. It’s an overall fascinating presentation for anyone even remotely interested in games and/or psychology. I was excited to see how many of Nick’s observations align with my practical experience. For example, during my L&D work with Disney and Kaplan, we were able to realize improved motivation by applying concepts VERY similar to the cluster motivations Nick discussed, including social, mastery, achievement, and immersion. An improved practical understanding of workplace psychology is paramount for continued success in organizational learning, especially when attempting to integrate game mechanics and complex decision-making into the user experience. The Big Easy Budget Game Lets New Orleanians Balance The City Budget from FastCompany How much do you know about your hometown’s budget—besides the fact that things you care about never seem to get enough funding? What if you could improve your understanding and have fun at the same time? That’s exactly what New Orleans will attempt in the fall when they release the Big Easy Budget Game. In addition to exploring this real-world application of learning through gameplay, this article also looks at the question of accessibility—a common concern for digital workplace learning. The team must consider both the lack of available public technology as well as language barriers when deploying a game-based solution. Yes, this application is more of a simulation than gamification, but it’s still an interesting story about the value of gameplay in non-traditional situations. I’m looking forward to a follow-up after the game launches with the release of the city budget in a few months. Gamification Research: What the Numbers Reveal from Karl Kapp These curated insights would not be complete without highlighting the latest research by gamification guru Karl Kapp. Karl has partnered with Axonify to use our massive database of user data to dig into the real-world business impact of gamification. In this presentation from Learning Solutions 2016, Karl reveals some initial findings from his research, which will be published in a peer-reviewed journal later this year. For example, he found that employees using Axonify were 51.64% more motivated to engage when they had the choice to play a casual game as part of the experience. Results like this not only validate Axonify’s approach, but will also help L&D teams better craft their gamification strategies based on what really works. I’m excited to follow Karl’s work as he continues to merge an academic approach to research with real-world outcomes. That’s it for this month’s curated insights on gamification. I’ll be back next month to share a collection of articles on another theme that is impacting the world of workplace learning. If you’d like a behind-the-scenes look into my curation efforts, follow me on Flipboard, where I post new articles on a variety of L&D themes every day. Written by JD Dillon The post Curated Insights - It’s ‘game on’ for Gamification in the workplace appeared first on Axonify.