There is a rising awareness and interest of corporations about corporate sustainable behaviour. Sustainability issues are increasingly integrated into corporate strategies, actions, and behavior. Different approaches, systems, and instruments have been developed to support corporate sustainability management. An important aspect of any sustainability‐related corporate initiative is to train employees and to develop sustainability‐related competencies. To enable education and training in this area, an interdisciplinary team of researchers, consultants and practitioners developed a management game called ‘sustainability manager’ (www.sustainabilitymanager.at). This paper presents the key features of this business simulation and reflects the experiences of the application of this management game in training. This management game is based on a business simulation, i.e. a company is modelled using web technology and soft computing approaches. The sustainability manager can be used as a web‐based training instrument for sustainability management and can be adapted to specific training situations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.