SELR102 Do Your Employees Hate Training? Games Are the Solution!
11:00 AM - 11:45 AM Wednesday, October 23
Expo Hall: eLearning Rockstars Stage
You need to train your team, but your employees say they hate training. Why? Because most corporate training is broken; it’s often long, boring, and passive—resulting in very low retention rates. Training in the form of reading, lectures, audio, or visual presentations only yields 5 –30% retention rates. That means that 70% of your efforts are being wasted.
A successful training program must be fun, short, mobile, and social. When trainers achieve this combo learners are more engaged, performance objectives are improved, and knowledge retention increases. How do you make this happen? With games!
In this session, we will demonstrate why game-based training is critical for engaging your employees and changing their behavior. Games are simply the best way to provide active training. We’ll show you examples of games across industries, and explain which game mechanics align with specific performance objectives. We will show you how to create games and how to build a gamification strategy that can be used for new-employee onboarding, sales and product training, leadership development, safety, security, compliance, systems and processes, customer service, and many other training topics. Once you create a game-based training strategy, your employees will be begging for more training!
In this session, you will learn:
- Why traditional training isn’t working anymore
- That training needs to be active to increase knowledge retention and change behavior
- That game-based training is the solution to making your training more active and engaging
- How game-based training can increase knowledge retention and change behavior when training soft skills
- Examples of game-based training
- How to create a game
Technology discussed:
The Training Arcade®
Target audience:
Designers, developers, managers, senior leaders (directors, VP, CLO, executive, etc.)

Stephen Baer
Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer
The Game Agency by ELB Learning
Stephen Baer is co-founder of The Game Agency (by ELB Learning), an INC Magazine Best Workplaces Company. He is a monthly contributor to Forbes.com and a regular speaker at EdTech conferences. For 15 years Stephen has been creating award-winning games to educate and activate audiences for new-employee onboarding, sales and product training, leadership development, safety, security, compliance, systems and processes, customer service, and many other topics. Stephen has also helped shape the education industry and disrupt traditional learning methods with S.T.E.M, FinLit, and Social Skills learning games that have been deployed in over 20,000 schools.