Tips on Gamifying Career Services in Higher Ed

           Having recently presented at the MBA Career Services and Employer Alliance’s Global Conference in Miami, I was a bit surprised by the response I received. For those of you who couldn’t be there, I am going to layout everything that I did for a gamification initiative at Johns Hopkins this past year, along with what worked, and what didn’t.

           When I first started at Johns Hopkins University, I was charged with putting on a week-long event with more than a dozen outside presenters. After 3 months of planning and outreach, I expected to see the presentations full of students. Regrettably, in many instances, we only saw a few students at most. It was a humbling experience, but certainly not a surprise, as my time in higher education has taught me that more and more, students just don’t show up for programming. This was what got me thinking of a solution to a problem that seems to be pervasive across all of academia.

 Having read a bit about gamification, and seeing it in so many aspects of my day to day life, I thought I would try to apply it to the student experience of career development for a test cohort. What this looked like was the assignment of points to every bit of programming that we had planned for the fall of 2017. Each workshop, networking event, career fair and other programs, was worth anywhere between 2,000 to 20,000 points. We tracked student attendance using a kiosk swipe, but there may be QR code solutions for mobile phones that could work just as well. As the students attended events, they earned points which enabled them to progress through a ranking system (rookie, veteran, master…etc.). Once the students had amassed enough points, they would be entered into a resume book that was shared with recruiters from top employers in their field. That way we could offer employers a different metric to evaluate students. Independently of GPA or other metrics, this measured which of our students were hungriest.

Additionally, to ensure that the students were gleaning something from the programming, I had a token system using gold plated playing cards. These were handed out randomly to students that actively participated in each program. Each card had a different point buff value. So if we wanted to encourage attendance to a specific program, we could let the students know that an ace, king, or queen would be in play at that event.

I was expecting maybe a 10% or 15% increase in attendance, but the test cohort (depicted with blue bars below) dramatically outperformed other programs by a factor of 2 to 14 times in attendance across every event that we had that semester.

We also captured the total percentage of students that attended one or more programs that semester. Other MS programs had 42% attended, whereas the test cohort (MSIS) had 86% as seen below.

Given these results, we tried to drill down in the second season (semester) by inviting those students who came out on top of the previous season to demonstrate their readiness to work in front of a panel of judges. On a Saturday morning at the school, top performing students were assessed by faculty, staff and employers in communication, presentation, networking, and dining etiquette. The students who received passing scores across the board were given an “elite” designation, and awarded a specialty lapel pin that identified them as our top performers to recruiters at our career fair.

Most of the feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive. This being said, we also heard that they were tired of attending workshops. It occurs to me that this could be easily abused and could make the student experience far more stressful than it needs to be. I also found it is better to offer a series of small “carrots” rather than one big win or lose carrot. We saw a lot of the students who did not come out on top, lose interest in the second season. Originally, I wasn’t planning on running the initiative in the spring so having the big incentive at the end of the semester made sense.

If you intend on doing something similar, I would encourage you to create a reward system making it worthwhile for people at all levels of engagement so that you don’t lose anyone. If I could do it again, I would have likely made employer lunches and alumni networking opportunities a regularly occurring incentive to motivate students to continue moving forward. I also think that a leaderboard works fine, but tends to demoralize anyone not at the top. So if you use one, make sure that you are only showing students where they are compared to other students in a similar bracket, particularly if your leaderboard will contain a large number of people.

This next semester, my plan is to deploy gamification again and target a different aspect of what we do here. With any luck, it will be a success and worthy of sharing with you all. Until then, I’m here if you want to talk about all things gamification and/or career development.