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Attensi white paper Playing to Win for pharma, cover showing medical staff gathered around a tablet

White paper

Playing to win: Transform your pharmaceutical training with gamified simulations

Pharmaceutical training for sales and medical reps that engages and upskills your staff, consistently, at scale. Make measurable impact on the business KPIs that matter to you.

Get your free comprehensive guide to gamified simulation training for the pharmaceutical industry today.

Team Attensi

Published · Updated

In your comprehensive 12 page report you will discover:

  • Use cases on how gamified simulation training is already being used by leading players to address their skills gaps. Find out how 81% of employees at an international pharma company said simulation training made them think and act differently at work.
  • How to harness the opportunities for simulation training across your pharma business. Roll out impactful onboarding that will set your people up for early success. Empower them to master new protocols, product indications, and operating procedures wherever they are. Measure the results against the KPIs that matter to you.
  • The key steps to creating and executing effective gamified training programs to upskill your people. Start with your business metrics in mind, identify the key decision points staff need to prepare, and set rewards and goals for them to achieve.

The demands placed on pharmaceutical teams have never been greater.

  • Lightning-fast product launches every quarter.
  • Rising, demanding scrutiny from regulators.
  • Evolving customer expectations for confident teams with up-to-the-minute technical knowledge.

And yet, despite the industry’s reputation for pushing the boundaries of innovation, training still largely relies on methods that have not changed in over 20 years.

  • Passive reading materials
  • Tick box e-learning programs
  • One-off classroom training

Get your free copy of “Playing to Win: How gamification is transforming learning and development in a rapidly changing pharma marketplace” now.

Download our white paper

Investing billions in information that's forgotten

$359bn
spent on corporate training globally each year (Harvard Business Review)
70%
of employees say they haven't mastered the skills needed to do their jobs
80%
of learning is lost within a month of one-off training
$18bn
paid by pharma companies to the US Government in non-compliance settlements, 2010–2017

The changing pharma landscape

Pharma lags behind other sectors on digital maturity — only 8% of pharma companies rate themselves as 'digitally mature'. But COVID-19 changed the pace: the biopharma industry moved further in ten months than it had in the previous ten years, and sales and medical teams now need to perform across more locations, launches and regulatory regimes than ever before.

Top-performing sales teams today must be:

  • Prepared for increased regulatory scrutiny, responsive to customer sophistication, sensitive to increasing localisation, and capable of creative problem-solving and quick decision making.

So how does training that hasn't changed in 20 years hold up against all of that?

The pitfalls of PowerPoint

Most pharma L&D still looks like this: reading and 'remembering', awkward role play, classroom-based training, e-learning modules, video lectures. Passive, one-off, and easy to tick off — but not built to make knowledge stick.

The cost of that gap is concrete. Humira, the highest-selling pharma product in 2019, sold close to $20 billion — each day of market exclusivity was worth around $54 million, which makes any delay to product rollout and training extremely expensive. And with pharma companies operating across multiple countries and cultures, a one-size-fits-all training programme can't flex for local regulations, language and sensitivities the way the business needs it to.

This is exactly where gamified simulation training earns its place.

What is gamification, really?

As gamification pioneer Yu-Kai Chou explains:

"Gamification isn't just games. It's not just fun. It exists to create business value. The user enjoys the experience, but business metrics must improve too."

Gamified simulations use game design, 3D modelling and behavioural science to model real-world scenarios — giving staff a safe place to make mistakes and learn from them. Our brains have little incentive to hold on to information we only read; we lock skills into long-term memory by experiencing them.

Attensi's own Gaute Godager, Creative Director, puts it more bluntly:

"You can't learn to dance by reading about it! We learn by doing. A simulation is make-believe, so there's no fear in experiencing the behaviour you want to learn."

Closing the competence gap with Boehringer Ingelheim

Boehringer Ingelheim used gamified simulation training to help sales consultants and MSLs solidify their scientific knowledge and feel confident speaking to physicians — with 600 users registering voluntarily and playing the app 40 times on average.

Erica Rademacher, International Product Manager at Boehringer Ingelheim, explains:

"Gamified training differs from our usual training methods because it's based on the psychology of learning. We've had a tremendous response."

Jenny Payne, Associate Director of Training at Boehringer Ingelheim, adds:

"It becomes an addiction. You just want to go in and beat your score again, and the only way to do that is to repeat the training until you get them all right."

That competitive pull adds up: across 600 registered users, repeated play didn't just mean engagement for its own sake — it closed real knowledge gaps, fast.

600
users registered for non-compulsory training
40x
average plays per user
86%
of the knowledge gap closed

4 steps to effective gamified simulation training

  • Start with business metrics in mind — know the goal before you design the game.
  • Identify the key decision points staff need to prepare for — and build the simulation to help them make the best call every time.
  • Research individual motivations — competitive reps respond to leaderboards, others to collaborative challenges.
  • Design with empathy — the simulation has to reflect how real healthcare providers actually think and speak, not just how staff behave.

Get those four right, and failure becomes the fastest route to mastery — not something to avoid.

As Attensi co-CEO Trond Aas sums it up:

"Learning by failing is a great way to learn — as long as it's in a simulation and not in the real world."

The global gamification market is on track to triple to over $30 billion by 2025. As 5G, AR, VR and voice recognition mature, gamified simulations will only get more powerful and more accessible — a promising glimpse of the future of pharma L&D.

Are you ready to level up your training?