Gamification in Russian Companies’ Corporate Education Practice: Relevant Problems of Implementation

Abstract

Many researches showed that companies started to understand the positive effects of investing in employee development and, therefore, investments in corporate education programs in companies is increasing. However, professional corporate educators face the following serious problems with engaging employees in the training and development processes: fast changing environment and need for new motivation techniques for the next generation of employees One of the solutions to the mentioned above problem was adopted from game industry and education and evolved into and gamification – the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game context. However, in gamification is not as popular in Russia as in other countries around the world. Moreover, due to the fact that so far, no research was done on the problems of gamification in Russia, it is impossible to tell the reasons why such a powerful tool as gamification seems to be not widely used in corporate education practices of Russian companies. For the reason of the described above problem, we formulated the following research goal of this thesis: to define and structure the relevant problems of gamification in corporate education in Russian companies implementation. In order to reach the research the described above goal, the following tasks were assigned: study and present basic principles and theoretical foundations of gamification; define and analyze relevant problems of gamification in modern corporate education revealed in the open sources of information; conduct in-depth interviews with Russian and foreign actors of gamification in corporate education implementation process; processing and analysis of received data; and provide structured list of relevant problems of implementation of gamification in corporate education in Russian companies. The main results of this research are the following: a structured list of 13 gamification in corporate education implementation problems consisting of 36 sub-problems; a theoretical analysis and comparison of the Russian and Global gamification market; and empirical data received from 33 in-depth interviews with Russian and foreign experts; recommendations for Russian gamification specialists for improvement of their products and services.