A serious game to give students careers advice, awareness and action

The university Careers Service seeks new ways to reach out to students and help them to prepare for their entry into the job market. Working with the Careers Service, we designed an online web-application to gamify the students' learning of a range of knowledge, skills and experience related to career development and employability. The aim was to help students to learn new skills, and make them aware of their need for them. It took the form of a game which students would play weekly in class. The students were able to play the game outside class as well, in their own time. Those who appeared to be more engaged did so. The tasks were a mixture of in-game actions, as in any other game, and also real-world actions, like sending emails to develop networking skills. The tasks were co-designed with the help and expertise of the Careers Service staff. Students got in-game feedback for some of their in-game actions, which gave them a personalised experience through indirect communication with careers staff. We found some fair engagement of the students with the game, but it was not strong in all cases. The enhanced levels of careers support was not sufficiently valued or appreciated by the students, it seemed to us. In other ways, it was a beneficial exercise. Within the game, students were given fairly interesting tasks to perform, and some informally said that they were occasionally very useful and instructive. The game was partially successful, in our assessment, and we intend to use it again in future. However the gamification was not perfect, and we believe it suffered from some common issues, showing that gamification is not easy to get right. The more innovative aspects of the game remain interesting and worthy of future development.