With the increasing adoption of VR in education, the ability of the technology to generate empathy and engagement have made some tout it as the ultimate learning tool – and this has not missed the attention of corporations. With the increasing dynamism in operations of companies, investing in the learning and development (L&D) of their workforce has become imperative to survival.
Corporate training seminars in lavish halls and hotels had become the bread and butter of 21st-century work life. In the last two years, these training sessions had to shift completely online and their efficiency of imparting knowledge has gone down due to the phenomena of “Zoom Fatigue”. Yet with no end in sight to a mobility restricted world, many companies have already started adopting VR for corporate training and the results are extremely positive.
Benefits of VR for Corporate Training
Virtual reality will take the seamless global connectivity we enjoyed due to the internet to another level. This technology offers multiple benefits over both the current zoom era of corporate training and typical physical seminars:
1. Cost and Time Efficiency
Corporate seminars tend to have a lot of costs associated with them such as travel, lodging, venue, trainer fees and other auxiliary costs. Whereas, the cost of usage of VR is very low, especially in the last few years the headsets and software have come a long way in becoming feasible. All the unnecessary costs to training are trimmed away and the experience is also far more convenient to all the participants involved.
Image Credits: chachamal from Adobe Stock
2. Global Connectivity
A lot of corporate training involves professionals having to travel to the area where the specialists will be best able to provide training. This increases the overall hassle attached to the training, not to mention cost and time. With VR, corporations can firstly reduce unnecessary travel and secondly be able to reach out to trainers across the world, improving their access to the best trainers.
3. Increased Empathy and Efficacy
A lot of corporate training revolves around topics that involve interactions and some degree of practice. Even though trainers find a way to do demonstrations and employ various resources, the impact of the training tends to be limited. Virtual reality’s immersive capabilities make demonstrations far more interactive and directly engages the learners, so much so that the rates of retention and skills acquisition are starkly higher compared to conventional methods.
4. Depersonalization
A big psychological barrier for learners is the pre-existing social instincts that hinder them from asking a lot more questions or taking initiative during training. While interacting in a virtual reality set-up, the entirely new and depersonalized space helps them over their fears more easily.
Image Credits: joyfotoliakid from Adobe Stock
VR for Corporate Training | Case Studies
The usage of VR for corporate training is quite old, having been used in professions such as surgery and military for making high stakes vocational training safer and less stressful by removing the element of dire consequences. Now, the technology has made headways into more conventional corporate training setups. There are many organizations across the world that have made big shifts in the way they train their employees using this technology, the following is a list of such real-life case studies:
1. Accenture – Skills and Processes Training in VR
In the last two years, as most businesses were freezing their hiring, Accenture has hired a whopping 125,000 employees over this time period. As an organization rapidly expanding in the era of remote working, their biggest woes stemmed from training their new employees and inculcating a sense of belonging in them. To solve this issue, the company invested in acquiring 60,000 HMDs (Head Mounted Displays) from Oculus for their trainees to use and take part in virtual reality training sessions.
Image Credits: sofiko14 from Adobe Stock
The CEO of Accenture, Julie Sweet, has spearheaded these workforce expansion plans and has a vision of striking a perfect balance between the physical and digital workspace with the help of VR. Their usage of VR for training focused especially on aspects such as organizational processes and skills acquisition for their fresh employees. The organization already had a certain degree of expertise in handling these groups of technologies and hence was able to conduct the majority of the training in-house.
2. Bank of America – Soft Skills and Client Servicing Training
Very recently, the Bank of America announced a training drive for more than 50,000 of their client servicing personnel. Focusing on soft skills training, the company has developed an entire VR software that lets employees train real-life interactions with customers. The software was built in-house by the company’s L&D wing called “The Academy”.
Due to the high immersions created by virtual reality, every demonstration is as good as real as it removes the apprehension of it being a gimmick or practice from the employees. On the other hand, this training software also collects huge amounts of data on the performance of each employee in their training and conveys it to their managers for even better monitoring of their progress. According to the company’s press release, the VR training module has reduced the training time of client servicing personnel from 10 hours to barely 30 minutes with far better results.
Image Credits: Impact Photography from Adobe Stock
3. Boeing – Complexing Manufacturing and Technical Training
Boeing, the aircraft and aeronautics giant, deals in highly technical products that cannot have any margin of error in their construction. They identified that the biggest error while constructing an aircraft takes place in the wiring of the aircraft which is done manually by trained workers. In order to improve their retention of the process, they employed Varjo, a prosumer focused XR and HMD producer for creating VR based training modules for their employees.
Due to the highly graphical nature of the training in VR, employees were better able to retain the exact processes and precautions they had to follow for each task – in far lesser time taken than usual training methods.
4. ICFAI Hyderabad – New Skills and Concepts Training
The ICFAI Hyderabad conducted an upskilling and new concept familiarization seminar in VR with the help of NextMeet. Due to the technical nature of the concepts involved, the usage of VR paid off as the graphical nature of the technology relieved the attendees from having to visualize. Apart from the ease of understanding, virtual reality-based seminars are far easier to sit through as they are ergonomic to the user’s senses. The software offers features such as gamified environment and spatial audio to recreate a similar environment as a real-life seminar hall, which puts users in a comfort zone.
Image Credits: gorynvd from Adobe Stock
As remote working culture expands and finds more acceptability as the norm, and not just as an option for contingency, the usage of virtual reality for corporate training is bound to expand. In a world where teams are spread across the globe, training and familiarization of a company’s processes are best translated through VR. This technology is the natural next step for corporations to adopt on their path of creating the offices of the future.
