Virtual Reality for Employee Training – Fad or Fab?

Training new hires has always been an investment for companies regarding time, money, human resources, and other ways a new employee changes your team’s dynamics.

Often, new hires are trained on the job, which can lead to understandable errors in real life scenarios. While customers are most often understanding when it comes to someone’s first days at a job, certain errors can seriously damage your brand and make you lose clients.

Companies that have the resources to train their new employees before letting them begin their actual work have different approaches to make the training as short as possible, but without compromising its quality. A training period that is too short or too shallow can easily compromise the employee’s efficiency and render the training futile.

If you are struggling as a company owner, a manager or HR specialist to train your people more efficiently, we have a great alternative to present: virtual reality training.

How Did VR Get into Business?

If you think about it, offering training in a professional setting is a brilliant way to use VR’s potential as an environment simulator. And it is quite common knowledge that it’s being done for training airplane or helicopter pilots. Errors can cost lives and airline companies understand that better than anyone else. Doctors and surgeons also use VR for the same reason.

So why not extend it to other industries too? Why can’t we use it for businesses that only have material losses at stake? Or even do it because we want to get better at what we do, and not just because we are scared of error.

How Does VR Work in Professional Training?

Using virtual reality is excellent when training a new hire. It puts them in a very good replica of the real environments they will work in. Moreover, it combines different factors that will affect the future performance, exposing the trainee very quickly to a real-life situation

It Makes the Trainee Learn Faster Than Before

By exposing them to an environment that they can interact with and that replicates the real deal in multiple ways, you can improve the information retention rate drastically.

Imagine transcribing a video game’s tutorial into text only, removing the possibility of interacting with it. Would you find it easy to get used to it, understanding it, and using it immediately after reading?

It Improves New Skills Fast

Because of its potential of making employees remember new information, plus the high interactive level and degree of customization from the developer, a virtual reality training can bring impressive results. Studies and companies that have implemented this technology have proven that VR can help employees acquire new skills amazingly fast.

This new ground of training methods is very exciting, for it really changed the game and its still on everyone’s lips. Just as it becomes more accessible and companies get the courage to use it, employees themselves are changing their energy and looking forward to performing better in such a progressive environment.

Using VR Makes You a Desirable Company

Whether you had good people leave your team or not yet, you probably know just how hard it is to retain truly valuable individuals within your company. And it’s not just about what salary or benefit you can offer.

Lots of professionals shift to other companies or simply sabotaging their work when they are unhappy about their jobs. It’s your job as an employer to motivate your team enough to keep them with you for years.

VR training is relatively new, and it is still innovative. It will certainly give you an advantage over others.

You Can Make Training More Fun and Engaging

Ok, so you give your new hire the right resources, time and a safe environment to exercise their skills and knowledge, but do you actually give them an experience worth mentioning?

Creating the stories that enclose the training information is just as important as the technical part of it. As advanced as VR can be, it really uses your writing skills to be successfully exploited. It needs an accurate description of the environment, realistic ways in which it reacts to your actions and possible scenarios you can have in real time.

Our definitive verdict is that VR training is a fab. We recommend it for big and smaller companies alike because it gives back a lot. It helps you save resources, and it trains your new hires efficiently, keeping them engaged. Not to mention, it adds to your prestige as a company.

We suggest you start exploring this possibility and begin incorporating it in your training program, as VR will soon become a norm. Good luck and have fun with it.