How to use virtual reality for corporate training
Have you ever considered using virtual reality for corporate training?
At Edify, we believe that the metaverse is key in enabling organisations to supercharge their corporate training strategy. Immersive learning can be deployed in a variety of ways and can drive engagement at every level of the business, from frontline workers to the C-suite.
Want a more efficient way of upskilling your workforce? Need a new onboarding strategy? Wish that you could level up your senior leadership team in a space that looks and feels real, but is also psychologically safe? This is what immersive and virtual reality learning can do.
Read on to discover how you can level up learning in a safe, smart, and 21st-century way...
7 ways to use virtual reality for corporate training
1) Customer service training
It’s tricky to get customer service training right. Often organisations train their customer-facing staff by simply getting them out in front of customers and learning on the job. However, this isn’t ideal. Mistakes can happen and those mistakes can be costly: reputational damage for the business.
Using virtual reality for customer service training enables organisations to avoid these challenges. Staff can role-play various scenarios in immersive environments that look and feel real. It enables businesses to equip their workforce with the skills they need, without any reputational risk. From an employee perspective, this can also help drive up confidence and competence.
2) Onboarding
Get your employees off on the right foot with a virtual reality onboarding experience. Design everything you need for effective onboarding and host it in a virtual world. Using immersive learning experiences in this way could allow organisations to create a repeatable onboarding playbook that can be accessed by employees anywhere in the world, in person and remotely.
Another great advantage of using virtual reality is that the experience can be revisited as many times as needed. As employees are often bombarded with information in their first few weeks in a role, VR can function as an important resource for them to replay, and retain, key information.
3) Recruitment and retention
Virtual reality can be deployed during the recruitment process to identify strengths and weaknesses of candidates. The results could then be leveraged to ensure that new employees are set up for success from day one. More broadly, meeting the demand for upskilling opportunities is something that organisations need to do – and do effectively - if they want to boost staff retention.
HR Dive report that 91% of tech employees want more training opportunities from their employers. Similarly, 32% of employees who were considering quitting their roles in the next 12 months said that a lack of learning and development opportunities as a key factor in their decision. Using virtual reality can enable organisations to scale upskilling opportunities and retain their staff.
4) Diversity and inclusion
Virtual reality enables learners to see the world from someone else’s point of view. It enables them to walk in others’ shoes and see and experience the world from different perspective. For those reasons, it makes virtual reality an ideal solution for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
A study by PwC about using virtual reality for soft skills training found that it’s hugely impactful, too. Not only were learners much more engaged in the experience in virtual reality, compared to classroom learning, three quarters said they had a “wake up call” while learning about diversity, equity, and inclusion. They realised they weren’t as inclusive as they previously thought.
5) Leadership development
Ensuring that senior leadership teams have the right skills is critical for any business. But in the real world, the environments that leaders will have to learn in are very clearly artificial. Role-playing scenarios with colleagues in an offsite environment or logging into an e-learning course about leadership skills doesn’t look or feel real – and that makes it tricky to fully engage with.
This is where virtual reality learning comes into play. It enables leaders to learn in immersive simulations that are engaging, effective, and time efficient. It also means they can make mistakes and see how certain scenarios would play out, without real-world consequences.
6) Managing difficult conversations
Employees across every level of a business have to manage difficult conversations every single day. Whether it’s conversations with difficult customers, disputes between colleagues, or working with challenging stakeholders, it’s a crucial skill set that’s important to unlock in any organisation.
Traditional role-play scenarios aren’t necessarily the most effective for this, however. In virtual reality, it’s a different story. Life-like simulations mean employees can immersive themselves in realistic scenarios and refine how they react. Learners can also benefit from working in an environment that is psychologically safe - where it’s OK to make mistakes.
7) Hard skills training
We’ve talked a lot about using virtual reality for soft skills training, but it can also be effectively applied for hard skills training. Learning hard skills in the real world can be challenging, particularly when employees are having to master complex skills in difficult or hazardous environments.
When you use virtual reality for hard skills training, you bypass those risks and enable employees learn safely. Use virtual reality to create a controlled, risk-free virtual simulations that look and feel the same as the real world. Not only can learners practice and repeat highly technical skills as many times as needed, they're also able to do this without putting themselves, or others, in danger.
The benefits of virtual reality for corporate training
But why use virtual reality for corporate training in the first place? There are several reasons. A PwC study centred around the use of virtual reality for soft skills training revealed multiple benefits. Amongst the findings, it discovered that virtual reality learners learn quicker, are more emotionally engaged, and are more confident in what they’ve learned compared to classroom learners.
There are also other benefits when it comes to using virtual reality for corporate training.
Benefits of virtual reality for corporate training at a glance:
- More efficient, effective, and engaging
- Works for global and hybrid organisations
- Reduce travel costs and carbon footprint
- Creates a standardized learning experience
- Can be deployed and scaled quickly
- It’s cost-effective at scale
Want to learn more about how virtual reality technology could help your organisation upskill your workforce more efficiently and effectively?
Read more on our Enterprise page.
