How esports help build 21st century work skills

Esports are now gaining formal footing in New Zealand’s universities and sports governance, where they provide a training ground for world-class teamwork and coordination and also digital skills, talent development, and economic growth. Esports represent an untapped source of human capital and innovation – a sector in which young people are already mastering digital collaboration, strategy, and performance under pressure.

For years, critics dismissed gaming as mere distraction, but research increasingly shows that coordinated esports teams exhibit the same hallmarks of elite organisational performance that we study in business, health, and the military.

In my own research, published in Organization Science, my colleagues and I investigated how expert teams who had prior competitive interaction could coordinate when the going gets tough; when plans collapse and time pressure peaks. We called this ‘extemporaneous coordination’; the ability to improvise collectively without chaos.

In a second study, we examined how teams learn by repeatedly facing the same rivals, a process we named ‘competitive familiarity’. Rivalries, we found, create shared expectations and mutual adaptation that ultimately make both sides better.

Those dynamics are now unfolding daily in New Zealand’s esports scene.

A new institutional footing

The University of Waikato recently opened the country’s first purpose-built university esports arena, where the 2025 Tertiary Esports Clash drew teams from campuses across Aotearoa.

These are not casual LAN parties, where people bring their computers or consoles to a single location to play multiplayer video games on a local network. They are structured tournaments with coaching, analytics, and post-match reviews; exactly the organisational routines through which teams in any sector improve. As they ‘play’, students are learning how to communicate clearly under uncertainty, handle stress, and rotate roles seamlessly.

The economic upside of esports

Gaming isn’t just a cultural phenomenon, but an economic one. Globally, esports and interactive entertainment already generate more revenue than film and recorded music combined but the real value in gaming for New Zealand lies in the capabilities esports develops. Every varsity league, shout-caster, coach, and analyst role builds digital fluency, data literacy, and production know-how – skills transferable to software, broadcasting, logistics, and defence.

A recent MBIE review highlighted New Zealand’s shortage of digitally skilled workers and its goal to grow the tech sector into a $20 billion export industry by 2030.

Esports are an inexpensive talent pipeline for that ambition. Students who learn to coordinate online tournaments or run live broadcasts are practising the same multi-platform project management used in tech firms and creative studios. As integrity frameworks professionalise the scene, sponsorship, event management, and analytics startups will follow, potentially generating employment in regional hubs from Hamilton to Dunedin.

Lessons for business and education

Esports are a way New Zealand companies and classrooms may rethink teamwork. Traditional team-building workshops often simulate cooperation under fixed conditions. Esports reverse that logic: everything changes constantly, so teams must maintain trust and shared awareness while adapting on the fly. That’s precisely the organisational agility modern workplaces demand.

Educators are starting to see the potential of esports. Some secondary schools already field esports squads under the NZ Secondary School Esports programme, where teachers report improvements in communication and student engagement. The challenge now is to integrate these experiences into curriculums rather than treating them as extracurricular curiosities.

A call to recognise the lab we already have

If New Zealand wants to prepare its future workforce for volatile, data-saturated environments it need not build expensive new simulators. The labs already exist – in our university arenas, student clubs, and regional gaming communities. What’s missing is recognition of what they offer. Policymakers who see esports only through the lens of screen-time risk are overlooking a live demonstration of 21st century coordination, learning, and innovation.

Supporting esports infrastructure – coaching certification, analytics training, health safeguards – would not just help players win tournaments, it would strengthen our broader digital-economy ecosystem and position us as a regional leader in performance science.