AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF BUSINESS GAMES ON PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

Using games to support education, offer an engaging experience, providing some of the most important characteristics needed for the achievement of an effective learning process. Moreover, gaming contexts encourage players/learners to a positive and motivating approach towards learning contents. Basing on recent researches, this is particularly true about certain types of games and categories of players, such as business games for adults. It extents the utility of games to adult education for professional training.In 2016, Osel S.r.l. - e-learning revolution (Spin-off Company of the University of Bari - Italy) developed an innovative business game-based project commissioned by Sky Italy, which is one of the most important telecommunications company in the world. The project "House of Sky" aimed to measure the impact of the use of business games on professional training. For this purpose, after the development of the project, the evaluation phase of this research involved 700 Sky employees, participating to test sessions in order to assess knowledge base access rate, engagement in training process, customer satisfaction and employees' product knowledge.Through a complex business-game based training program, structured into three phases training/game, test and evaluating survey - the research team aimed to figure out how a game-based learning context could influence the training process (if positively or negatively) and in which way employees could take advantage of a similar training approach. Assessing a specific evaluation survey compared with the game results it is possible to assert the effectiveness of a business game-based approach as an innovative methodology, providing successful outcomes in terms of proficiency and of engagement of the employees in term of positive attitude developing, motivation enhancing and engagement.