CSL delivers innovative biotherapies and influenza vaccines that save lives as well as enable people with life-threatening medical conditions to live full lives. Driven to make a meaningful difference for hundreds of thousands of patients and stakeholders around the world, this dynamic company strives to continually motivate its workforce to think outside the box.

To inspire these brilliant minds to expand their skill sets and grow their careers, Maestro designed a thoughtful eLearning solution with a unique gamified approach outside of the authoring tool.

A whole new game for inspiring career growth

The intention of the learning experience was to encourage employees to explore options for their long-term career path at CSL, based on their perceived strengths, skill sets, and goals. And while games are typically whimsical and entertaining by nature, they’re also often more complex to build than most players might realize. The following were our “rules,” if you will, for building an interactive career pathways game for CSL:

• Design an engaging and fun solution for a global, virtual audience (27,000 employees spanning the globe).
• Motivate new hires and seasoned team members to visualize their future with CSL.
• Connect the overall messaging/approach to corporate strategy initiatives.
• Create a personalized learning journey that functions and lives well on multiple devices.
• Ensure a one-player, asynchronous environment.
• Collect key user data.
• Limit play time to 10—15 minutes.

Winning with WordPress 

The first step was to identify the best platform to support our project needs. Considering the scope and expedited project timeline, we determined WordPress to be an optimal content management system for this custom gaming experience. Along with its cost effectiveness, especially when compared to Articulate Storyline or custom software, WordPress also offered design, implementation, and device flexibility and allowed for the collection of key analytics.

How we did it    

At the beginning of the project, we mapped the pathways and decisions a player could make as they traveled through their career life cycle. This required really thorough exploration of roles and close collaboration with the CSL team.

Here’s a peek at what mapping the options looked like.

Once we nailed down the paths and events along their journey, we designed characters, events, and player interactions. The final result: an inviting visual style, an experience that’s intuitive on multiple devices, and an interaction that’s inspiring and casts a positive vision for employee growth.

Maestro developed the experience all outside of an authoring tool and on a platform that most people think is only for blogging or websites. We like to think of the experience as a learning game-changer.

Key takeaways

Want to go beyond your (authoring-tool) comfort zone? Here are some questions to consider before you start:

1. Does the authoring tool put too many constraints on your vision?
2. Do you want your final product to tell a story and be narrative driven?
3. Do you want your learning to function like a dream, on multiple devices?
4. Have you thoroughly mapped out your process? (Going outside of an authoring tool can be an ideal solution for complex process training or learning with multiple variables.)
5. Do you have a development partner who’s not only an expert in the learning field but also skilled in creative/interactive design?