Designing Serious Board Games for Learning-Centered Onboarding: AHRD-Poly and Guidelines for HRD Researchers and Practitioners

This article argues that onboarding becomes a human resource development (HRD) intervention when it intentionally develops newcomers’ capacity to understand, participate in, and contribute to an organizational or professional community. We introduce AHRD-poly, a serious board game designed to familiarize graduate students and first-time participants with the Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD), as an illustrative application of learning-centered onboarding. Drawing on organizational socialization, situated and participatory learning, and game-based learning, the article links specific game mechanics to intended learning mechanisms and developmental outcomes. It also presents a facilitation sequence encompassing pre-briefing, gameplay, debriefing, transfer planning, and follow-up, and offers guidelines for HRD researchers and practitioners who wish to design or study similar interventions. AHRD-poly is a design artifact that demonstrates how organizational knowledge, social interaction, role exploration, reflection, and subsequent participation can be intentionally connected within an HRD intervention. The article also provides an evaluation framework and research questions concerning learning processes, developmental transfer, accessibility, and unintended messages embedded in game rules.