Fostering Employability Skills for Engineers With Serious Games: A Gamified GBL Concept

This paper presents FutureING, a serious-game-based learning concept developed at TH Köln's Faculty of Process Engineering, Energy, and Mechanical Systems to cultivate employability and "future skills" such as planning, communication, cooperation, adaptability, and conflict management among engineering students. The approach combines an augmented reality game in which student teams design factory layouts under budget, time, and reliability trade-offs, a desktop game in which teams operate the resulting production hall under randomized malfunctions, and a web-based TrainING Center that adds role-playing-style avatar progression, team leaderboards, and quiz-based rewards. The authors frame the work within broader arguments that engineering education must function as an open, digital learning ecosystem.

The central reported finding is a self-assessment study with 267 students, administered three times across a semester. Ratings in planning and communication, cooperation and flexibility, organizational skills, and conflict skills rose consistently after students completed each game component. The authors interpret this as evidence that the mixed-reality design supports the targeted competencies, though the study relies solely on self-reported measures without a control group or independent performance assessment, which limits causal claims.

The scope is a single cohort at one German university of applied sciences, drawing on a faculty that admits roughly 800 first-year students each winter semester. The TrainING Center's gamification features and its planned data logging are described as works in progress; key performance indicators for assessing skills from logged player actions were still being identified, and mandatory platform use in a subsequent semester was expected to produce substantially more data. The conclusion outlines an evaluation framework combining surveys, analytics, pre- and post-assessments, and iterative design, but the effectiveness of the TrainING Center itself is not yet empirically demonstrated.