Onboarding eLearning is the first impression given to new hires through online training to acquire new skills, knowledge, and behavior to become more effective in an organization. This impression goes as far as positively or negatively impacting employee retention.

Research has it that: More than one-quarter of new hires quit their jobs within the first ninety days of working. Most of which is due to lack of satisfaction in employers’ orientation program. That’s why you need to improve your onboarding eLearning.

With gamified learning, employees tend to gather the necessary skills and knowledge needed to finish up work-related tasks. The zeal to win the virtual reward attached to the gamified course makes it even more engaging for employees to learn better.

Besides being fun, engaging, and motivating to employees, gamification also helps in building teams, improving knowledge retention, and offering valuable feedback.

Here are 5 strategies to include gamification in your onboarding eLearning.

1. Leverage intrinsic motivation

Gamification aims at encouraging the growth of your learners. As such, leveraging intrinsic motivation into your gamified elearning can help in engaging and encouraging your readers to learn more.

There are several ways that you can leverage it into your gamified elearning. Here are a few ways to do it.

• You can design your elearning to highlight progress.
• Let the employees know from the beginning, what rewards they stand a chance to win.
• Enable your employees to socially share their progress level or scores with their colleagues.

By so doing, it’ll increase their confidence and zeal to do better and achieve higher scores or rewards.

2. Choose the right rewards and link them to the learning objective

Choosing suitable gamification mechanics or rewards is very important. Gamification goals/objectives can only get achievable when employees win badges or any form of rewards and progress to the next stage.

So, how can learning objectives be achieved?

You must be able to link the gamification objective to learning objectives, and this is only possible when you put in mind what your learning aims at achieving. Focus your gamification on ways to improve employees’ knowledge retention and behavior that merits your learning objective.

3. Focus on behavioral benefits, not just completion

It is easy to skip through a course, reach completion, and get rewarded. This is not a behavior that your design should focus on and reward. Your gamified learning must be able to give new hires guides that will lead them to the required information.

It’s best if you design your learning in a way that rewards every task that your learners perform. They should only be allowed to progress to the stage if they have acquired the learning objective of that stage.

4. Provide clear instructions and rules

You should set clear rules and instructions from the beginning of the eLearning course. To motivate your learners, you need to tell them the rewards that they stand to get if they reach the completion of a task.

For instance, for achieving a marketing badge, you can offer to let them attempt a conference of their choice.

This type of intrinsic motivation will encourage every employee to do better in order to win the reward.

5. Make it a bit of competition and challenge

The joy of gamified learning comes from the ability to overcome a series of challenges (or levels). Learners feel motivated if they are challenged to use their skills and experience learned in a course.

However, your challenges should get measures in the capacity of employees’ skills or task objectives.

Challenges could be in the form of questions, puzzle, or logic. It should be related to real-life job tasks, and employees must be able to overcome it with their level of skills.

In conclusion

Including gamification in onboarding, eLearning is a great way of investing in your new hires. Gamified learning helps to motivate new hires to acquire new skills and knowledge needed for them to grow in the employment cycle.

You can make use of wizcabin to automate your gamified eLearning course.