FDCareer brings roleplaying games to business networking online

A quirky, but interesting approach to business networking combines pen-and-paper style roleplaying games with career networking sites like LinkedIn or Xing. It’s aimed at students and young professionals.

Going by the (not so hip) name FDCareers, the service lets you choose a character class and gain experience points, eventually giving you level-ups for your accomplishments. You gain points by adding experiences to your CV and by interacting with others on the platform, so it adds a playful touch to the somewhat dry profiling approach that Xing takes. (LinkedIn takes a similar, if way more simple approach here, with their percentage-based profile building.)

In an email describing the service, they state:

Every time you gain an internship, become a leader of an organization, or get a high GPA, you gain experience and level-up in FD Career. People with high levels gain prestige and access to new features of the site. Our goal is to make personal and professional development fun for students and young professionals.

There are five categories you can get levels in: Education, Experience, Leadership, Social and Initiative. Adding friends on FDCareers would give you points. For example: By joining and adding a friend, I got two “social points”. Internships or job experience as well as social engagements would give extra points.

This approach is pretty cool, why should professional mean all dry and boring? However, there’s a few drawbacks as it is: First, the name. FDCareer? Could hardly be more boring, sadly to say. Second, the interface doesn’t exactly look like fun, either. (Even LinkedIn has a more compelling, more playful user interface.) Third, at the time I tried the service, I noticed a few technical problems (PHP errors in the profile pages).

As it is, FDCareers looks like a lot still has to be done. It’ll be a while, and a lot of work. The idea of spicing up boring resume building with gaming elements could be fun, though. Maybe the team should look into the basics of Alternate Reality Gaming, there could be some great inspiration there.

(Disclosure: Joseph Yi of Future Delivery, the company behind FDCareers, asked me for feedback on the service.)

1 Comment

Hi Peter, thanks for your mention of FD Career on your site.

Yes, the name is very simple and straight forward. Our company is Future Delivery, and this site is about enhancing your Career – hence, FD Career. We have spoken to a lot of people and they actually like the straight forward name. A lot of people are tired of the “Web 2.0” names our there that seem to have been generated by the web 2.0 name generator sites.

We just launched the site a couple of weeks ago; therefore, there are still a few bugs we have to fix. We will also be coming out with a re-design in two weeks that will be much more fun and sticky.

New features that we will implement soon are FD Answers and the Blogging Community. We hope that these features will create more community on the site.

Thanks for the great feedback and mention and we will definitely use it to improve our site!

  • Jun

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