Overview

My role: Project Lead / R&D Lead. I helped direct the project, coordinate the team and external partners, and shape the experience from an existing one-to-one career-development process into a more engaging world of games and chat.

The project started from an existing one-to-one process for tracking employees’ development and career progression. We explored how to make that process more engaging without reducing it to tasks completed for the company.

The concept became a game world with chat, where each person could identify what they wanted to develop and follow that evolution across professional and personal areas. The intention was to connect career development with a broader sense of well-being, so people could make progress at work while also feeling better in their personal lives.

Chess was an R&D initiative exploring professional development through game systems.

Chess Quiz:

Career and life priorities
The questionnaire explored achievements, challenges, turning points, motivation and advice for someone starting a career.

Example prompts included:
• Which achievement are you most proud of, and what helped you succeed?
• Which obstacle was hardest to overcome?
• Which project influenced the direction of your career?
• What has kept you interested in your field?

Relationships and learning
A second group of questions explored the people who influenced participants’ work, how those relationships developed and what participants learned from them.

These are selected prompts from the project questionnaire, not a validated assessment instrument.

The Next Level:

After developing the underlying model and testing it internally, we worked with Sight Dot to explore a game-based experience.

The concept allowed participants to create an avatar and a planet, with four moons representing development paths: hard skills, soft skills, leadership and well-being. These paths were intended to make goals and next steps more visible.

The concept also included peer interaction, skill validation and milestones for everyday contributions, such as helping a colleague or sharing knowledge. Progress could be represented as a skill tree, with potential rewards linked to achievements.

At the time this case was documented, the team was preparing further adjustments for internal use and considering an open-source release. This case does not establish that either release took place.