Innovating HRD to Develop the Millennial Generation Workforce: What We Can Learn from Serious Games

In response to the challenges of developing upcoming generations of workforce, this chapter proposed to adopt serious games as a fitting solution for HRD professionals to better engage the millennial generation workforces who are growing up with abundance of game-playing experience. From what serious games can offer as learning environments, the reason is twofold. First, serious games’ multidimensional characteristics (e.g., challenge, competition, fantasy, role-playing, etc.) can effectively engage learners during the learning process. Second, serious games’ interaction-rich environments are capable of developing learners’ skill sets in order to satisfy the ever-changing demand of workforce on complex technical, analytical, and problem-solving skills. From the process viewpoint, the complex design process of serious games for HRD purposes would urge HRD practitioners and researchers to reexamine existing HRD problem-solving methodologies (e.g., instructional system design models) from a more collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach with expertise from system design, interaction design, information science, and learning science. As a result HRD will be able to approach all problem-solving tasks with more responsive and efficient approaches in order to remain competitive in the global workforce development campaign.