How confident is the average business that employees will always carry out tasks in the right way or deal with an unusual event appropriately? We live in an age where customer experience is often the factor that decides where customers spend their money. Poor experiences spread like wildfire on social media.
One person not complying with good practice or a specified process can quickly harm your reputation. In some sectors it could expose your business to financial or legal risks.
On the positive side, better skills mean more productive employees and a consistently good experience for your customers.
Skills based training is all about teaching people how to do things the right way. To be most effective it has to be realistic, which is where the problems arise. Simulating a realistic scenario is difficult. It might involve significant staff downtime, employing actors, or travel to a specialist training centre with expensive simulators.
Even then it might not feel that realistic. It may not trigger the same psychological and physiological reactions as a real situation would. These reactions help us to recall what we did and the consequences. Immersion in the experience is the route to deeper learning.
‘Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.’ Benjamin Franklin
Classroom simulations have a tendency to feel artificial. They don’t connect with subconscious learning in the same way as real experiences. Computer simulations and e-learning have become big business and often struggle as much as classrooms to deliver the immersive experiences needed to develop and ingrain skills.
Simulating a hazardous environment or situation is also difficult. But these are the situations where having the right skills and responding in the right way under pressure in sectors from construction to care are vital.
Virtual Reality is Transforming Skills Training
Virtual Reality is starting to change the landscape for skills training. At the ‘elite’ end of skills it is being used to train NFL players so they can ‘experience’ where they need to be for certain plays and how they should react to on-field situations; overcoming the limitations of translating a chalkboard diagram into the players’ own reality.
In the military it has always been the case that there’s no substitute for combat experience. VR battlefield simulations bring the training experience closer to the real one.
Major retailers are using VR so that new employees can ‘experience’ the full horror of a Black Friday rush before they have to deal with the real thing.
Rolling out large-scale new equipment or technology in manufacturing or transportation is always challenging where large numbers of employees are involved. VR allows full and realistic training to take place in advance of the new systems going live and is being used extensively, for example, by the German state owned railway Deutsche Bahn.
Health & Safety training can be transformed by VR from a dull lecture into a realistic experience with deeper learning.
On the softer side of skills, VR can be used to help care staff learn how to deal with difficult situations with empathy or to defuse potential conflicts or challenging behaviour before they escalate.
Of all the emerging applications for VR, training is possibly the one with the clearest benefit and return for businesses. Products like Google Cardboard make the technology more accessible and development costs are becoming within the reach of smaller businesses.
If you would like to explore how VR could transform the effectiveness and impact of your staff training contact us today on 01823 429340 or email simon@accessvr.co.uk.