Last Updated on April 21, 2025 by Jacques Wong, B.Sc.
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Across various industries, employers and human resources personnel are continuously seeking innovative strategies to train professionals and boost learning and engagement. Among the notable approaches in recent years is gamification, which refers to incorporating games and gaming elements like challenges and rewards into non-gaming contexts. A Harvard Business Review article reveals that as the gamification market is expected to grow yearly by 27.4% from 2020 to 2025, it has started to find its way into professional development, particularly in the context of employee training and learning programs.
Among the industries deploying gamification strategies like goals, rewards, feedback, and leaderboards is insurance, with the same article citing the insurance agency Ansay & Associates’ top performers receiving a special prize after spinning the “Wheel of Wow.” Below, we take a closer look at the success and effectiveness of gamification in corporate learning and development, before outlining potential use cases in insurance training and overall learning outcomes for professionals like you.
Gamification in corporate learning and engagement
As previously discussed, gamification in professional contexts can either involve gaming elements like probabilistic rewards to motivate employees or specific games like poker to instill essential skills and competencies. The former was demonstrated by the aforementioned Ansay & Associates using the Wheel of Wow to reward employees for their excellent performance and customer service during the pandemic. Since the rewards were implemented in 2021, the agency reported a significant increase in workplace productivity and engagement.
Meanwhile, the latter can be exemplified by women CEOs using poker strategy to learn how to assess risk and uncertainty before making decisions and taking action. Since poker also involves negotiation, strategic maneuvering, and self-belief, CEO Jenny Just launched a poker platform that can equip women with leadership and decision-making skills. Just also noted that the gender breakdown of competitive poker and options trading is similar, thus setting a goal of teaching women to better allocate capital and be less risk-averse to advance in male-dominated spheres like business, investment, and finance.
In light of gamification’s benefits for productivity, engagement, and overall learning, the following section guides you through gamifying insurance training to prepare you to enter and move up in the industry.
Use cases for gamification in insurance training
Insurance training can start with reviewing for an insurance exam, to which a previous post serves as a study guide through tips like making your own notes, reaching out to your course tutor, and focusing on understanding concepts and applying them to real-world scenarios instead of memorizing facts. However, you can also learn from Just’s gamified approach of using poker to acquire and hone professional skills.
In line with the increasing digitization of learning approaches, you can explore video poker, a computerized version of the classic card game, to learn risk assessment and strategic decision-making while also incorporating rewards through payouts. The platform Thunderpick provides many variants of online video poker, such as Texas Hold’em, to introduce you to diverse betting scenarios and challenge your judgment skills as an aspiring insurance professional. As you progress through your learning goals, you can use the platform itself to gain financial rewards through payouts in the form of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
The insurance industry itself can also be a great source of inspiration for using gamification to train and prepare yourself for the profession. For example, the insurance group Cigna was an early adopter of the video game Re-Mission, which was launched in 2007 in partnership with the non-profit HopeLab to educate young cancer patients about the disease and motivate them to continue their treatments. The goal was to instill positive behavioral changes in health and wellness through interactive gameplay, and studies found that the gamification of health risk assessment among plan applicants increased completion rates by up to 70%.
In the same vein, you can look for video games with gameplay and elements that parallel real-world skills and strategies essential in the insurance industry. Insurance agents must have the analytical and problem-solving skills needed to deal with complex data, applicant history, and claims management, and games like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Professor Layton require you to use logic and critical thinking to gather facts and solve cases. By integrating fun, enjoyment, and engagement into training approaches, you can also advance memory and retention better than traditional methods like rote memorization.
In summary, gamification enhances insurance training and learning outcomes by equipping you with real-world skills and boosting engagement and satisfaction with the overall learning process. As you gamify your training plan in preparation for the insurance industry, you can also ask instructors and mentors for help introducing gaming elements like goals, rewards, and challenges into your e-learning courses and private or group classes for long-term success.