.svg)
Project Overview
Project OverviewA creative learning consultancy, designing and delivering an experiential onboarding program for a global data storage company
Learning Experience Designer — co-designed the games, content, scripts, and production; served as Game Manager across all live sessions
150+ freshers transitioning from college to corporate life, across three concurrent batches
Client L&D team, internal facilitators, external facilitators, tech hosts, and catalysts
Custom game files, password-protected interactive PDFs, video production, virtual breakout rooms
4.8/5 participant rating; measurably stronger interpersonal and communication skills observed in this cohort versus the previous year's intake
"How might we design a fresher onboarding experience that teaches real workplace skills through play — so that participants are learning without ever feeling like they're in a training?"
Learning Needs and Insights
Learning Needs and Insights
The client had run the fresher onboarding program with us the previous year. It was successful, but they wanted something different this time. Something people will enjoy, and actually remember.
Our team had been developing our thinking around gamification as a serious learning methodology for some time. Together, we built a framework of eleven design principles that defined what a well-constructed learning game needed to do: from how it opened and the narrative logic it followed, to how it created social dynamics, rewarded progress, and closed with meaning. This program was the first time we put that framework to work at scale.
To get under the skin of what makes games genuinely engaging, we went back to basics. We played a range of board games together, studying the mechanics from the inside - what created tension, what encouraged collaboration, what made you want to keep going. That research fed directly into how we designed the activities.
Three things we needed to solve for
Beyond Instructions
Telling freshers how to communicate, collaborate, or build resilience was easy but wasn't necessarily translating into behaviour. They needed to practise those skills in conditions that felt real, not theoretical.
Engagement had to be built in, not bolted on
Fun couldn't be a layer on top of learning. For the experience to work, the game mechanic and the learning objective had to be the same thing. Participants needed to succeed at the game by demonstrating the skill.
Scale and consistency were non-negotiable
With 150+ participants across three concurrent batches and 21 sessions to deliver, the design had to be robust enough to hold up across every single one without losing quality or energy.
The Design Logic
The Design Logic
We started where we always start: with the people, not the content. The soft skills freshers needed weren't complicated to list. What was complicated was designing experiences that would actually shift those behaviours rather than simply expose participants to information about them.
Our answer was seven original games. Each built around a distinct narrative world. Each anchored to a specific topic. Each containing breakout room activities where participants had to practise the skill in order to progress in the game.
How every session was structured
The design principle that mattered most: the game mechanic and the learning objective had to be the same thing. There was no moment where someone felt like the fun had stopped and the training had begun.
A game intro video sets the scene. Participants are assigned characters and become part of the story — not just observers.
Breakout room activities require participants to make decisions, collaborate, and persuade. Succeeding in the game means demonstrating the skill.
A facilitated debrief closes each session — surfacing what happened in the game and translating it into real workplace behaviour.
The Build
The Build
Six weeks of pre-production. No template. No precedent. Everything built from scratch by a team that was simultaneously developing the methodology and applying it.
The program had two parallel workstreams that had to stay tightly integrated throughout.
6 weeks
Game design
Content development
Bringing it all together
Both tracks developed in parallel and converged into a fully integrated experience — every game, every session, every activity aligned and ready for delivery.
The Production Behind the Delivery
The Production Behind the Delivery
Running this program live required a purpose-built team operating in clearly defined roles.
Facilitator intro
Sets the scene and welcomes participants
Game intro video
Drops participants into the narrative world
Activity one
Breakout rooms — practising the skill inside the narrative
Narrative video
Carries the story forward, sets up the next activity
Activity two
A different angle of the same skill — learning deepens
Debrief
Connects what happened in the game to the real workplace
Total delivery: 21 sessions across 3 weeks and 3 concurrent batches
The delivery team
Game manager
Held the whole production together — every game, every batch, every decision made in real time behind the scenes.
Facilitator
Ran each session live — the face of the experience for every participant in the room.
Catalyst
Kept energy alive inside breakout rooms, answered questions, and made sure no group got lost.
Tech host
Managed the virtual environment — breakout logistics, file sharing, and keeping everything running smoothly.
Impact
Impact
Beyond the numbers, what the client observed in the months that followed was more telling. This cohort of freshers showed noticeably stronger interpersonal and communication skills compared to the previous year's intake.
The client's L&D coordinator put it plainly: this was the first time they had seen a program where fun and learning were so seamlessly integrated that participants did not realise they were learning.
What I'd Take Forward
What I'd Take Forward
The biggest lesson from this program was that complexity in design does not have to mean complexity in experience. The backend complexity of all the work was visible to participants. What they experienced was a world that made sense, activities that felt meaningful, and a debrief that connected the dots. That only happens when the architecture is solid before a single session runs.
The other thing this program reinforced was the value of researching from the inside. Playing board games as a team was not a warmup exercise. It was the research. Understanding what makes a game worth finishing — the tension, the collaboration, the sense of progress — shaped every design decision that followed.
After the program concluded, I took full ownership of all experiential learning requests at the company. Every brief of this kind came to me — a reflection of what the program had demonstrated: we built a solid methodology from the ground up, making it easier to scale going forward.