While much of the world is currently experiencing a mild peaceful lull, other countries are now bracing for impact as they experience their second or even third wave of confirmed coronavirus cases. With many of us pressing forward into yet another month of working from home, remote education and training tools have become essential for businesses that need to train both new and current employees.
Hosting webinars, virtual Zoom meetings, or even in-person socially distant classes have become some of the most popular methods for training during this season. However, these approaches can often seem monotonous, boring, and falls short in providing an engaging and collaborative platform for learning pertinent information.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, VR training was proven to be a highly successful mode for virtual education. With its highly immersive capabilities, the ability to customize any curriculum and scenarios, using virtual reality for training has become an asset for all companies large and small. In today’s blog post, we’ll be exploring 3 key areas virtual reality training excels in and how the future of remote immersive education offers an alternative solution to studying textbooks and other traditional methods of learning.
1. Safety First
Prior to the worldwide lockdown, one of the main uses for VR in business was primarily in skills and safety training. Industries like construction, mining, or even retail where risk is a part of the job have been one of the largest adopters of the technology since it allows companies to adequately train their employees without putting themselves in harms way. This is definitely one area where traditional modes for training like studying textbooks or attending powerpoint presentations may leave employees feeling unequipped to respond calmly and quickly in the face of danger.
Picture being able to practice the steps to harnessing properly and inspecting your equipment before working at incredible heights or deep underground. Forgetting the small details and getting just one component wrong can put an employee’s life at significant risk. While the diagrams (if there are any) in the textbooks and instructional videos can provide the necessary information on how to handle hazardous situations, nothing beats having actual hands-on experience.
With VR’s immersive capabilities, companies can put trainees in real-world experiences without exposing them to unnecessary real-world dangers. Whether it be something as simple as crowd control or a situation so rare and severe like protocol for natural disasters, trainees can practice all of these scenarios and more until they feel confident and ready to apply their knowledge in the actual real-life event.
2. Resource Efficient
While training is an essential part in complying with certain regulations and onboarding employees well, it can be expensive and time-consuming. Weekend seminars, online courses and answering virtual quizzes can oftentimes be really dry and seem like a meaningless task. More often than not, these traditional methods for measuring knowledge promote memorization rather than having a true understanding of the material. Ineffective training sessions can prove to be much more cost intensive than investing the time and resources up front to explore a variety of tools and options to equip your trainees well.
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Since all the training will be conducted in a virtual environment much of training resources won’t be necessary anymore. Sending someone from your staff or even your whole team to host training sessions in another city or a different country has become a common practice for many businesses. However, with virtual reality training, the cost to purchase training materials, renting out training facilities, and compensating employees for the trip is no longer a factor. Plus, VR gives you free reign to build environments and scenarios that would be too big, too costly, or too unrealistic to build a real-life simulation for your employees to practice in. With virtual reality, all you have to do is specify the training to your needs, immerse your trainees, and give them the space to get equipped for any situation they face.
3. Greater Retention
We just briefly covered retention and how it can be costly moving forward, however the need for better training resources may be more important than one would expect.
“With traditional training methods, it’s estimated that employees are unable to recall as much as 50% of the information they are taught within just an hour after they’ve completed the course. “
Lorne Fade, VR Vision
Virtual reality training has been found to significantly improve retention rates due to how engaging the platform is. If you think about it, sitting in on a full day of training will probably wear you down and cause you to disengage from the lesson and discussions. However, with VR training, trainees can now interact with simulated real-world situations, allowing them to form their own experiences and connections to the curriculum. This not only makes learning seem like a game and much more enjoyable, but learning information in a way that is simple to understand can make it easier to recall information during assessments and especially during extreme circumstances.
Virtual Reality Training - The Future of Skills Development
We all have had our fair share of sitting in on training sessions that were less than engaging. However, with immersive technologies like virtual reality, the cycle of long-winded drawn-out lectures can come to an end, making way for a brand new alternative to the traditional ways we can support trainees in developing their skills for the job. With its ability to immerse users in safe barrier-free simulations, it’s time to unlock a world of possibilities with VR training.
Here at Yulio, we strive for excellence in performance and integrity when it comes to our product, and customer service. To see how other industries have implemented VR into their workflows and other VR training use cases, click here to access our Whitepaper. For more information on how VR can enhance your current processes and become the VR champion of your firm, sign up for our free 5-day email course here.
