Here’s a shocker for some of you: Video games aren’t a waste of time, after all. In fact, they may help land you a job.

And we don’t mean a gaming job, either.

Game Guy learned this not so much from personal experience but from the book “The Kids are Alright: How the Gamer Generation Is Changing the Workplace,” written by John Beck and Mitchell Wade four years ago, and updated two years ago. The tome — more likely something you’d put in your business bookshelf — relies on research culled from a survey of about 2,000 professionals who were asked what possible good could come from playing lots of video games.

Their assessment was that gaming actually does more than give one’s thumbs a workout; it helps develop strategic thinking that will pay dividends in the workplace and elsewhere.

It also may help score points with Brandeis University, where students of the International Business School there have started using a game created by IBM to boost business and information technology skills.

The game, called Innov8, puts students in lifelike business situations and encourages them to find solutions before suffering through them in the real world. Brandeis and IBM say this bridges the gap IT workers increasingly face outside their skill set.

Federal statistics show more than 90 percent of folks with IT training plying their skills in non-technical environments. Likewise, people with primarily business backgrounds have found increasing need for IT know-how as tech takes over their workplaces.

But that isn’t the only crossover. Tech has seeped into teaching, construction, health care, even library sciences. And instead of asking people in these and other fields to retrain through book learning, it might be easier and less expensive to learn through specialized games such as Innov8, which don’t just parrot static ideas the way book learning does but simulate real experiences and encourage innovative solutions.

Yes, it’s good to know all that time Game Guy spent on BioShock might pay off some day. He was wondering how long it would take non-gamers to realize this.