Improve your soft skills with training in VR
Completely absorbed in the task. That’s when you learn the best. When no phones, e-mail notifications or colleagues interrupt you – and when you are free to try the task again and again until you feel confident.
Training in virtual reality (VR) gives you exactly those possibilities.
And training in VR is not only useful for hard skills, like the virtual training experience we have developed for Maersk Training. It is also very useful for training soft skills.
VR redefines soft skills training
The global consulting firm PwC published a report last year that shows how virtual reality is redefining soft skills training. Through comparative studies of leaders training in VR, classrooms, and e-learning they identified that VR learners were:
· 4 times faster to train than in the classroom.
· 275 % more confident to apply skills learned after training.
· 3.75 times more emotionally connected to content than classroom learners, and
· 4 times more focused than their e-learning peers.
This is no surprise to us, as we are already developing soft skill training experiences for several customers.
One of them is DSB, the Danish national rail company, where service personnel is being trained in conflict management. We are also involved in a pan-European project developing soft skills-based training to the public transportation sector in EU through virtual reality. And we are doing a number of projects aimed at training support personnel in organizations of various sizes.
It’s the immersion
But why is VR training so effective for these situations?
“It’s due to the immersion. Once you put on the headset, you are 100 percent present in that environment. If you do a role play in a classroom where you have to imitate a stressful situation, it can be hard not to be distracted or even laugh a bit to ease the tension. Here, you are fully concentrated and can practice again and again until you feel comfortable with your own response. It can be resolving a conflict, but it can also be something as ordinary as giving negative feedback to a colleague. A skill which many leaders don’t like and have few ways of practicing,” says Christian Schrøder, strategic advisor in Virsabi and our specialist in virtual training solutions.
Does it pay off?
The finding from PwC that VR learners are four times faster to train than in the classroom doesn’t even account for the time needed to travel to the classroom, or the possible sustainability benefits of lesser travelling.
Looking strictly at the cost, PwC finds that VR training is more cost-effective at scale. Including the price of the headsets and the development of the learning experiences, it takes 375 learners for VR training to reach cost parity with classroom learning, and 1,950 learners to reach cost parity with e-learning.
The recommend solution for now is a learning mix. And if you are eager to find out how your training can be elevated by a VR training solution, don’t hesitate to reach out.
// Find the report from PwC here
