Often hours spent playing video games are seen as wasted time. However, research shows that overlooked as simply entertainment for children, video games actually help develop many of the most desirable skills in today's labor market.
So an avid Fortnite player or League of Legends champion is highly likely to have mastered the intricacies of teamwork and developed their critical thinking and decision-making abilities. In this way, untargeted gaming develops the talent employers need to secure a competitive advantage.
The Skills of the Future
With the automation of routine tasks, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and creativity are becoming increasingly valuable in the job market. This proves to be a big plus for skilled gamers, who often have to solve complex cases and come up with out-of-the-box solutions within various games. Games have been shown to teach effective communication of feedback.
According to employers, these are hard skills to find and even harder to develop today. 43% of them say that compared to technical knowledge, it is significantly harder to teach collaboration, effective communication, or teamwork.
This is why eyes are increasingly turning to video games as a source to apply expertise in these areas.
Gaming Skills Translator - Which skills have video games developed in you?
With interest in the topic growing, Manpower analyzed more than 11,000 games across 13 genres - from action-adventure to role-playing - to identify the top skills developed in each category. As a next step, we mapped how gaming experiences correspond with professional skills.
To finish, we identified groups of job roles where specific abilities were most in demand. For example, someone who plays Call of Duty or Fortnite cultivates skills highly valued by the logistics sector, such as critical thinking, spatial orientation, and problem-solving.
The result of all this is Manpower's patented online tool, the Gaming Skills Translator.
It allows each of you to input the specific games you play, the time you invest in them, and your experience and level in a given game. Gaming Skills Translator translates this information into a professional experience that you can add to your resume and mention within job interviews. In this way, you get to know your professional self better and get a clearer picture of what type of positions match your talents and abilities.
See which skills video games have developed in you here.
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