How gaming prepares future job candidates for the challenges of today’s workforce

Damon Neiser

I WAS READING an article the other day that showed pictures of the Vatican and all these amazing architectural feats that humans have achieved. Then right next to that, it showed contemporary 8-year-olds in Minecraft, the video sandbox game, and what they were able to build when presented with this opportunity to dream anything they wanted.

One of the most impressive examples is when a group of teens took on the Build the Earth challenge, recreating Earth on a 1:1 scale. While this idea started as a long-term project for a few people, they quickly enlisted the help of players from across the globe. This collaboration eventually grew from three people to some 100,000 folks, from more than 100 countries.

This wasn’t something contributors were being paid for; they were doing it for fun. They used modern technologies like Google Maps and Discord to ensure that their builds were extremely accurate, as well as to encourage seamless collaboration between contributors scattered all over the world. And while the Build the Earth project is incredibly impressive in its scope and difficulty, that only inspired other gamers to take their creations to the next level: Build the Universe. Both projects are exponentially more elaborate than anything our architectural great minds of past centuries were able to achieve.

As someone in the education industry (and also a gamer), I’ve always been fascinated by the potential of gaming for both entertainment and learning purposes. The conversation in education has always been, “Let’s equal the opportunity by educating every child,” and I believe that gaming is the next iteration of that. Because now you don’t have to guess what a child is going to be able to do—in gaming, you can actually show what he or she is capable of doing, and you can see it right now. Brilliant minds are revealing themselves super young today, and that’s why the CIA and DOD have been sponsoring and scouting eSports and gaming for their potential recruits while simultaneously creating their own teams to compete professionally. They literally start looking at kids in middle school and earlier and follow them throughout their journey.

Gaming is today’s equal opportunity provider. It’s also now the great economic equalizer, because for a minimal investment of a game console and the game itself, plus being online, these kids, literally within two years, are winning purses of between $6 million and $40 million. This is akin to what used to be the size of boxing purses for world heavyweight bouts, and these kids just started playing two or three years ago, so it wasn’t like they had to train for 20 years just to be able to compete at that level.

One of the main points of education is to prepare students to be productive members of society and to meet the challenges of tomorrow, and critical thinking is a necessary part of that. Gaming allows us to put in all of these amazing problems and challenges and scenarios. Think of flight simulators: The reason we don’t have hundreds of plane crashes a day is that all these pilots have done thousands of hours on a simulator. What gaming allows us to do is take these unique challenges and problems that are just at the ideation stage, put them in these games, and watch these kids work together to solve them. So gaming is training these critical thinkers and problem solvers to the point where they’re coming in and bringing that enthusiasm to learning.

A major challenge in education has always been that kids get frustrated with subjects like math, English, and language arts, and they shut down, because they’re not motivated to try to get over that hurdle. As soon as they get frustrated, they just give up. What video games are doing is bringing critical thinking into the play and creating these “productive strugglers” who now say, “I know this is going to be challenging. I know I’m not going to know everything to do, but here are the steps I’m going to take in this problem-solving process to figure out this overall challenge.” Instead of saying, “I’m just not good at math” and giving up, now they can say, “I just haven’t figured it out yet.”

That has always been the biggest obstacle to learning—that students lose their motivation because it hasn’t been fun, or they can’t see beyond what they assume are their personal limits. But gaming has literally created these kids who can come together collaboratively and problem-solve together. Then they’re teaching each other how to do it. You’ve really learned something when you can teach it to someone else and they understand it. That’s when you’ve accomplished conceptualized understanding.

While gaming has become mainstream and even publicly encouraged in 2025, the movement of gamers quickly contributing to the workforce is nothing new. These same digital natives have been helping modernize the workforce and increase productivity for the past quarter century. They are piloting our drones and performing our city planning. Gamers challenge the status quo and often find ways to increase productivity and efficiency. Once thought of as a brain-rotting activity, gaming is now being used as one way to measure collaboration, as well as aptitude. As the public perception of gaming shifts into a world of acceptance, employers are discovering a treasure trove of talent that went unnoticed for years. Gamers have proven to be collaborative, innovative, and to bring unique perspectives as we tackle day-to-day challenges or perform long-term growth planning. They are quick adopters of new technologies, and adaptable as the unexpected presents itself. If you don’t have gamers on your talent radar, you may find yourself quickly behind the curve.
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Damon Neiser, a former resident of Arkansas, is Chief Revenue Officer of Alma, a Cloud-based student information system.