Leadership development and soft skills training are critical to a company's success. In today's fast-paced and ever-changing workplace, traditional training approaches may not be sufficient to meet complex leadership needs.
By combining immersive virtual environments with specific soft skills training, VR offers a unique opportunity to provide executives with realistic and hands-on experiences. In this interview, Johannes Schneider, Managing Director at digital learning agency vr-train, will explain to us in more detail how VR-based executive development enables soft skills strengthening and what benefits this innovative method has for organizations.
JS:We target young leaders or those junior roles facing challenging situations such as dealing with poor team-oriented behavior or difficult situations in meetings. We create 360-degree videos with real actors in these situations and involve our stakeholders in the challenges they face. Then, they have to react to these challenges.
We offer different options, mostly learning scenarios where something has gone wrong and an interactive coach joins the participants in the conflict situations and guides them towards new approaches to conflict management.
In this way, learners recognize their own behavior and rehearse new ways of behaving. The entire process is based on a scientific background, specifically on a systemic approach to counseling. Especially here, the change of perspective plays an important role: on the one hand, the users assume the leadership role, but on the other hand, they also experience how they can affect others in this role.
JS: The potential fields of application of Virtual Reality in leadership development and in the soft skills sector in general are manifold. In product development, we focus on enabling people to experience human communication. And who can communicate better than real people?
So we have developed an immersive training with real actors and actresses in which challenges in everyday work can be acted out. One of the most impressive feedbacks was from a lady who became nervous in the training because she actually felt the pressure in this situation exerted by actors. Now that is emotional learning.
JS: We wanted to get our product ideas on the market within a short time. In other words, we were looking for a tool with which we could quickly bring immersive learning experiences to the market.
3spin Learning offers exactly that and is our partner on three different levels. First of all, No Code Authoring allows us to get into production quickly. The learning curve was very steep, not only did we work faster, but we were really more productive. As a result, we were able to create four products within a short period of time. This allowed us to focus on our core soft skills competencies.
The next step is the deployment: 3spin Learning supports us and ensures centralized deployment within VR glasses and the roll-out of the training to our users.
In addition, there is a third essential point that we can take care of with this tool, namely the learning management assignment of users to the courses and the learning success control. The learning platform makes it easy to track when employees complete which training.
Johannes Schneider, vr-train
JS: Without the right eLearning partner at our side, we could not have implemented our learning content with Virtual Reality so quickly. In addition to technical know-how, expertise, and experience are also important.
3spin Learning has already successfully implemented similar projects and understands the challenges and best practices of integrating VR into learning programs. With their knowledge, they guide you through the entire process and ensure that the content is effective and engaging.
Similarly, a good partner understands the technical requirements and limitations of VR hardware and software and can help in the selection process to ensure an optimal learning experience. Similarly, VR learning solutions should be scalable and future-proof so that they can flexibly adapt to new technologies and requirements. In this way, our investment in VR learning content will remain a long-term value.
JS: Time-to-market is crucial in product development. The faster a product is launched on the market, the faster we can gather feedback from our customers. With 3spin Learning, we managed to do just that. We were able to concentrate on our essential competencies – developing high-quality didactic media content.
Programming content authoring with 3spin Learning is very easy and no programming knowledge is required. The web-based interface allows good results within a short period of time.
JS: Undoubtedly, the big trend is artificial intelligence, i.e. AI. Our topic is social and emotional intelligence. Accordingly, our question is how these two components can be combined. In our development, we perceive artificial intelligence as a tool. However, it is integrated in such a way that the human factor is always the determining factor.
In this way, we can use artificial intelligence to create individualized learning paths and guarantee the impression and experience of natural communication – even if there are actual actors involved.
Thank you Johannes for the interesting conversation!
Managing Director Johannes Schneider is a seasoned veteran when it comes to digital learning in a digitalized world. Along with his colleague Thomas Dorner, he offers Virtual Reality Experiences for HR and personal development with vr-train that really stick.
Founded in February 2022, they have now developed four products in the field of soft skills and leadership development.
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