Gamefication in Career E-Counselling

Abstract

In a world of the online, any company or organization attempts to remain on the market by any means possible. For this reason, in the virtual environment, marketing is reinventing itself. One of the marketing strategies used in the virtual environment is that of game elements introduction or even little games to attract new customers or to fidelize the current. Although at a first glimpse, gamefication is not an absolutely necessary strategy, gamefication could and should represent a new trend in counselling or education. Gamefication is an approach that uses game theory to increase user involvement in the proposed activity. Assuming that the game produces a state of relaxation and recreation, the proposed activity, regardless of the degree of difficulty is dealt and accepted by the user. This paper starts from the idea of using gamefication in online career counselling, just because induces the user a state of relaxation, state that usually does not accompanies career decision. We can add here the user/online client fear of being judged by a person- career counsellor, and being treated like a man who has a problem. Therefore, we propose in this paper an online game / application for career exploration and career advice. Firstly, we shall analyze advantages and disadvantages of this trend for online career counselling, then we shall try to describe the theoretical background of this game (Holland's theory, personal career map) and also the choices made for design step by step, and in the end we shall try to emphasize once more its usefulness. We believe that such a proposal can only revolutionize this field by making it more "user friendly".