2033. Imagine you want to be trained as a teacher, but the study program no longer exists. Instead, you sign up for a worldwide "challenge", taken from the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. As a future educator, you are particularly interested in the goal of "ensuring an inclusive and equitable quality of education" (United Nations, 2022). For the next four years, you are working and studying with students in architecture, game design, psychology and others to develop new ideas for this challenge. But where did you acquire all the skills needed? Could it be that you already have all these skills because you are a passionate video gamer? If that sounds like a crazy idea to you, according to futurologist McGonigal (2022), every innovative idea, like designing a study program that relies on skills acquired in a video game, sounds crazy at first. Whether the studies of tomorrow will look like this is not known, but efforts in developing interdisciplinary studies for global problems, like the climate crisis, are already underway (McGonigal, p.221f). Also, the consideration of youth cultures as a source of "informal learning" (Zeimet, 2011) is not new, so it is certainly worth taking a closer look at the (learning) potentials of one of the most popular cultures of young people: the gaming world.

Young people play video games, worldwide. For example, in Switzerland, more than two-thirds of the adolescents aged 12-15 report playing video games regularly (Bernath et al., 2020). In many games, gamers are involved in highly social and creative activities. They use wikis, form teams, try multiple identities in role-plays, or they even modify games (Du et al., 2021). It is shown, that the used skills could also be useful in the "real world" (e.g., Granic et al., 2014). 

Also career planning asks for specific skills that need to be developed whilst in the process of planning. Thus, if teachers educate students in career planning, it could be a good idea to take the gaming experience of the youth into account (Rochat & Armengol, 2020; Rochat & Borgen, 2021). Among others, the used skills while playing video games could be seen as a useful resource for the career planning of adolescents in lower secondary school. The research question is, whether adolescents are aware of the skills acquired in video games and if they can transfer these skills to career planning. We asked therefore adolescents to think about the skills they use in video games to map them to the skills needed in career planning.

As part of the research project digibe - digital guidance in the career choice process (Nägele et al., 2020), a task was designed in which students were asked to think about their career planning like it is a video game (Hoffelner et al., 2022). Participating students are at the lower secondary level, grades 9 to grade 11. More than 691 students visited the intervention about gaming and career planning in the period from September 2021 - January 2023. The tasks they had to complete were to test their gaming personality, to describe their gaming interests and skills they use, to compare them with their vocational skills and interests and to think about their career planning in a different way by using a video game metaphor. That means that they were working on different questions like “What if your career planning is like a game: Which challenges could arise? Who is in your team? Who are your enemies? What is your mission?” and on a concept for a game about career planning. 193 students (43% girls) completed the task on skills in video games. The students attended grade 9, N = 64, grade 10, N = 105, and grade 11, N = 24. After the task students were invited to reflect on what they have learned. Additionally, students were asked up to three times per semester to evaluate their vocational interests, their motivation, their self-efficacy, their (un)decidedness and other important indicators for career planning. Using the template of 21st century skills (Dede, 2010), which are considered almost inevitable for a future highly digitalized labor market (Maire et al., 2017; Bettinger, 2021), these responses are grouped and categorized with MAXQDA, and combined with data from the repeated questions on the status of career choice, analyzed with JASP.

In the first step, we looked at the responses of the students of the question of which skills they are using during a game and whether these responses could be matched to the 21st-century skills. We found that 24% of the students, N = 193, are stating ICT (information, communication and technology) skills as at least one of the five skills they are using while gaming. Also they are indicating life and career skills, including primarily initiative & self direction skills (52%), flexibility and adaptability (38%), and social and crosscultural skills (14%). Learning and innovation skills, including problem-solving skills (52%), creativity and innovation (47%), and collaboration (27%), are also given as answers. Around 50% of the young people say they will need these skills also for their career planning. So, is the future closer than we thought, and gaming a gateway to prepare young people to design their own career path in the modern world? We would like to invite you to a discussion on this topic, especially on the opportunities but also risks for education that trend terms such as gamification, 21st-century skills and digitalization represent. We will also show further results from the digibe intervention study, especially demographic differences of students and their gaming habits. Also we will discuss the possible transfer from the gaming world and its needed skills to the career planning, by taking the career adaptability approach (Savickas, 1997) into account. The research project was significantly co-financed by SERI.

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