How video gaming could boost your career
Are you a video gaming master? Put it on your résumé
By | Ross Pomeroy | bigthink.com
When Heather Newman, an avid gamer, was applying for the job of director of marketing and communications at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, she included all relevant experience on her résumé, including her prior role as a guild master in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.
While most people might not consider video gaming to be applicable to the workplace, Newman disagreed. In her in-game role, she managed guilds of as many as 500 people and organized 25 to 40 players to raid dungeons for several hours four to five days a week.
Newman’s intuition proved correct. She got the gig.
More than three billion people now regularly play video games. Gamers have triumphantly escaped their derided status as “lonely, lazy nerds.” They are no longer just pizza delivery people or technical assistant gurus at Best Buy’s Geek Squad; they are managers and CEOs — and astrophysicist Adam Frank.
Video gaming skills are transferable
As Françoise LeGoues, the former vice president of innovation at IBM, told the Wall Street Journal in 2014, gamers can thrive in workplaces “where employees must collaborate with colleagues anywhere in the world, often without having met in person,” foreshadowing the post-COVID era of remote work. “This capability to engage in strategy-building, team-building, knowledge-sharing, and problem-solving remotely is really important,” she added.
