Case Study: Village Roadshow gamifies its skills program

Village Roadshow has evolved its learning experience for its staff to make it more interactive.

Michael Fagan, former chief transformation officer for the entertainment company, which operates cinemas and theme parks such as Warner Bros Movie World, told Digital Nation about how they gamified their skills program.

Fagan said, “The AWS Guild tournament is a very new approach to learning. Gamifying that learning experience, supplementing online training with classroom training and doing it in a friendly and fun environment just makes learning not seem like learning, but is something fun to do.”

The 12-week course allows for any employee to learn a new skill, regardless of where they work in the company.

Fagan said, “We built together a number of cross-functional teams, so what you think is important, so it's not just your team that you sit with every day.”

The teams included “people from the business” to pitch ideas and offer a corporate perspective and “then together with the AWS team, we have developed and built out some of those ideas.”

The course covered “a base level of training” such as "what is cloud computing 101" and running various competitions including who gained the most number of training hours, most certifications or implementable ideas.

“It's a bit of healthy competition and a bit of fun, uh, you know, introduced into the work environment,” Fagan added.

Fagan explained the competition has created an academic atmosphere and helped build relationships with staff.

“It's building rapport amongst staff. It's building connections amongst people who don't usually get to talk to one another and building connections across different functions, not just people in IT, but people in finance, people in marketing and getting them to sit down and talk about what problems, what business problems exist that potentially could apply a technology solution to,” Fagan said.

As an example, Fagan said the marketing team decided on a chatbot that could answer basic questions for customers regarding event information or topics around ride maintenance.

Fagan says this upskilling is helping boost the company from an innovation standpoint.

“We talked about training, but it's a training that is kind of like a Trojan horse …and started a cultural transformation."

He added you can't “innovate unless you're trying new things [and] if you're trying new things, some things are going to fail which can be difficult for people.”

“When it comes to failing, it's something that nobody wants to admit that they're failing. That's something else that I've kind of noticed.

“We have had some people fail their first attendance certification and succeed in second, but nobody gets punished for failing,” he said.

The biggest change Fagan has seen is a change in the nature of conversations people are having.

Fagan said, “That's what I'm most pleased about. It's one thing to go through a training course in order to get a piece of paper. What I'm seeing is the behavioural change and the conversational change.

“We can even talk about simple storage service or we talk about compute or we talk about auto scaling.”

“It just means we're getting there to that same position much more quickly, which for me is probably the most valuable thing rather than a single specific course.

“That's been good for us,” Fagan said.