Stressor Event Covid-19 Lockdown? A Multi-wave Study on Young People Starting Their Professional Careers

The objective of this paper was to evaluate the impact of the pandemic as a stressor event on young people at the beginning of their professional careers. We report on three subsequent studies on a relatively underexplored aspect: The lack of inspiration, challenge, and team spirit, could lead to job boredom, disinterest, and a perceived limitation to personal development. At its extreme, a boreout can occur. A boreout describes a negative mental state triggered by prolonged exposure to the combined impact of the three aforementioned dimensions. Boredom and a crisis of growth became evident, but neither of the three studies could find evidence for disinterest or a crisis of meaning. Instead, it revealed the magic of resilience kicking in and confirmed that digital work connectivity diminished the negative side-effects of starting a professional career during the lockdown. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Gamified hands-on-training in business information systems: An educational design experiment

The Covid-19-pandemic confronted lecturers worldwide with the sudden necessity to develop concepts suitable for distance education. Students' motivation became a crucial aspect of prolonged e-learning situations. This paper reports on an educational design experiment to change a hands-on-training on SAP ERP-Systems into a gamified self-paced e-learning environment. This training accompanies a lecture on Business Information Systems for first-semester students. Allowing mistakes to happen kept the attention high and made achievements within the learning environment more rewarding. An anonymous online survey confirmed the relevance of self-paced learning for learning efficiency. Even though a positive impact of “mistakes” on learning efficiency was not confirmed, comments and statements of the participants pointed towards an effect on learning, worth further research. We contribute to the body of knowledge by providing lessons learned on gamified self-paced e-learning within university courses. It could be verified that business process-related hands-on-training within an ERP-System could be implemented in a gamified self-paced e-learning environment without compromises regarding scope or scale of the content. Copyright © 2021 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved