Making hidden competence visible

Case study

How a publicly funded gaming project helped young adults translate existing capability into workplace language, contribution, and a more useful understanding of themselves.

By Peter R. Valderhaug

The problem was easy to interpret as a lack of confidence, motivation, or employability.

I saw a different possibility. The competence might already be present, while the language connecting that competence to work had yet to be built.

That distinction became the starting point for a research project on gaming, real-world competence, and workforce inclusion.

A competence arena hiding in plain sight

In 2023, I led a publicly funded pilot through AOF Østlandet exploring the skills young adults develop through gaming and how those skills might become relevant in education, employment, and career guidance.

The project combined quantitative and qualitative work. We collected survey responses at The Gathering, Norway’s largest digital gaming event, and supplemented the data with interviews, observations, conversations with recruitment professionals, and cooperation across gaming, esports, education, and workforce inclusion.

The statistical analysis was conducted with Yunhao Matthew Xiao, then a doctoral research fellow at BI Norwegian Business School. The findings indicated patterns in areas including digital skills, communication adaptation, listening, role modelling, intuition, creative team thinking, and the ability to handle setbacks.

More experienced competitive gamers showed particularly strong self-reported scores across several of these areas. Younger participants showed relatively stronger scores in digital content creation.

The data mattered. The most useful insight emerged when we looked at what happened between competence and contribution.

The gap between gaming and work

A person can become highly capable inside one context and still struggle to access that capability inside another.

A gamer may understand how to coordinate a team, read a changing situation, communicate quickly, manage resources, recover after failure, or learn a complex system. Those abilities may be stored mentally as part of “gaming.”

When the same person enters a job interview, a classroom, or a meeting with a public support service, the context changes. A different set of expectations becomes active. The person may think of themselves as inexperienced, uncertain, or someone with little to offer.

The skill remains, but their access to the skill changes.

This is where the project connected directly with the coaching principle that people often carry more resource than their current description of themselves allows them to use.

Coaching, in this context, was less about adding confidence from the outside. It was about helping participants notice the evidence already present in their own experience, give that evidence useful language, and connect it to a situation where it could influence action.

Building a bridge between contexts

The workshop methodology was designed around a simple sequence:

1. Begin with a familiar arena. Participants chose a game they knew well and described what successful performance actually required.
2. Make the process visible. They identified strategies, decisions, roles, communication patterns, and responses to unexpected events.
3. Name the underlying capability. Gaming language was translated into planning, collaboration, adaptation, problem-solving, leadership, and handling setbacks.
4. Move the capability into a work context. Participants explored where the same way of thinking or responding could create value for an employer or team.
5. Practise contribution language. Each participant created a short presentation describing what they could contribute in a workplace.

The approach began with experiences the participants already recognized. From there, we widened the meaning of that experience.

This matters because a question only becomes useful when the person has somewhere meaningful to search for the answer.

The workshop at NAV Fredrikstad

NAV is the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, Norway’s public agency for employment and welfare services.

The methodology was tested with a group of young adults at NAV Fredrikstad in collaboration with the PIAU project. NAV employees attended as observers.

The room carried tension at the beginning. The participants had experience with employment initiatives, guidance, and conversations about what they should do to find a job. Another workshop could easily have entered the same mental category.

We therefore spent time inside the participants’ own frame of reference. We discussed gaming, professional esports teams, the roles people take, the problems they solve, and the way players communicate when circumstances change quickly.

The atmosphere shifted as work became recognizable through their gaming experiences.

By the end of the 90-minute workshop, participants had produced short presentations describing what they could contribute in a work setting.

NAV staff shared that the same group had struggled the previous day to name a single positive aspect of their own work-related competence.

The workshop created a different search. Instead of beginning with missing experience, it began with lived mastery. Instead of asking participants to become convincing, it helped them realize the contexts where they already were convincing, which allowed them to be more precise in their presentation.

What changed during the intervention

A 90-minute workshop cannot establish a new identity by itself, but it can create a meaningful interruption in an old one.

That interruption matters when it gives the person access to evidence, language, and a response they can continue practising.

What this case revealed about coaching

This is closely connected to the coaching work I do today.

A leader may have authority and still lose access to it in a particular room. A founder may make clear decisions in one area and become caught in an old pattern in another. A team may possess the knowledge required to address an issue while its unconsciously established communication keeps that knowledge outside the conversation.

My job is often to identify what already exists, understand what prevents access to it, and build a bridge into the situations where it matters.

The wider organizational lesson

Organizations regularly search for capability using familiar signals: education, job titles, industry language, and recognized career paths.

Those signals are useful. They can also leave valuable experience outside the frame.

Better questions create a wider view:

These questions support inclusion while remaining grounded in performance. They help the person and the system move from assumption to evidence.

What the case supports

The project supports a practical conclusion: gaming can contain experiences that participants perceive as relevant to communication, digital competence, teamwork, creativity, and adaptation.

It also offers a proof of concept for competence translation. When young adults were guided from a familiar context into workplace language, they became more able to describe their contribution.

The report also points toward the need for further research. A larger project could examine employers’ assumptions, observe competence beyond self-report, and test how this methodology works over time across different groups and work settings.