TrainingPort Plays Corporate Games With BreakAway

A new company focused on "video gaming and simulations for the corporate market", TrainingPort Strategies, has been founded, with major 'serious games' firm BreakAway investing in the new firm, which aims to provide corporate training through games. Joe Biglin, a co-founder of BreakAway, formed TrainingPort Strategies, which his former company has taken a minority stake in, "to help corporations improve employee skills and capabilities through the use of engaging educational experiences." TrainingPort Strategies will "provide training tools that range from board games to fully customized, highly visual fidelity simulations." According to new data, today’s corporate workers will have played 10,000 video games and sent 250,000 emails by the time they enter the workforce. Those same workers will spend less than 5,000 hours reading a traditional book. The need for engaging employee training becomes more acute as more baby boomers retire, taking with them a plethora of institutional knowledge and experience. Video gaming and simulations provide a new means for preserving the knowledge these boomers possess and conveying it to others within the organization. “This use of video game technology for training is becoming more popular, as a new workforce- one that is tech-savvy and has considerable exposure to games- moves up in the corporate setting,” says TrainingPort Strategies founder Biglin, who has 25 years of training development experience in the corporate world in addition to 10 years in the game industry. “This new generation of corporate workers is part of a learning shift that has moved from a linear learning style to a hypermedia learning style.”