The Business Simulation Blog

At Cesim we are glad to welcome Graeme Kirkup into our team, who has recently assumed the position of Senior Vice President of Corporate Solutions. The following post reviews his professional background and the path that led him to fall in love with business simulations.

Business simulations are a great way to apply business theory and know-how to a realistic business setting and increase students' employability. But what about the other and equally important set of skills that employers look in their personnel, namely soft skills? Can they also be practiced by using simulation games?

Probably now more than ever, companies require their new recruits to have experience in business decision making. As this prerequisite might prove difficult to comply for higher-education recent graduates, business simulations can come in handy to provide students with experience in the complexities, uncertainties, and ambiguities of decision making in an intricate business world even before entering the working life.

The use of Business Simulation Games can make learning goals more achievable for higher-education students according to a meta-study by researchers of the University of Utrecht (Netherlands). Simulations have become a vital part of academic courses in different business and management fields, the researchers from the Dutch university point out, and after reviewing a series of studies on Business Simulations, they have also identified 3 best practices for their successful use: specificity of the game, integration in the course, and role of the instructor.

We have previously explored how a Brazilian University brings Business Simulation Games to the next level. Yet, this is not the only instance in which educators using Cesim Simulations have found interesting ways of combining online and offline tranining. DBA Jose A. Flecha Ortiz, professor at the National University College in Puerto Rico, has combined online training using Cesim Global Challenge, our International Business and Strategy Simulation Game, with offline activities as part of the capstone course of his business students.