5 Reasons why VR is the future of corporate training

A recent study revealed that companies lose nearly 25% of all new employees within a year mainly due to bad onboarding. This statistic alone showcases the significance of Corporate training and the important role employees play in the future of a company. Though the results of investing in corporate training may not be immediately evident, it plays a crucial role in ensuring that the employees can nurture and enhance their skills, which is an important factor in employee retention and growth. For industries such as manufacturing where the employees use dangerous machinery, experiential training methods play even more of a crucial role.

Traditional methods include group discussions, lecture sessions, online training, and other off-hand sessions. Yet these methodologies fail to give the users an experience of the process they are getting into and often find a stark difference in what the training session prepared them for and the actual tasks they are getting into.

Immersive technologies like AR/VR are excellent tech options that are currently being used to bridge this gap and provide an experiential and safe environment to train employees. But what are AR and VR? Augmented Reality (AR) is when we digitally augment objects using technology onto the physical world. In Virtual Reality (VR), users wear a VR Headset that immerses them in a 3D environment.

Let’s look at the 5 reasons why VR is the future of corporate training:

1. Experiential & Immersive learning: Users receive hands-on training of complex processes to gain proficiency

2. Improved retention: Users retain detailed information when they practice and experience the processes hands-on.

3. Customizable: The developed application can be easily updated and adapted to match any improvements or changes in existing processes.

4. Safe & Risk-free: Trainees can practice and learn intricate processes without the fear of life or damage to property.

5. Cost & time efficient: Experiential learning drastically reduces training time as users understand quicker and become productive sooner.

Tacnik, an award-winning experiential technology company based out of Bangalore, has been using VR and AR to develop novel solutions to enable companies to train their employees and external stakeholders efficiently. “The immersive and experiential nature of VR & AR provides a platform using which we can seamlessly teleport the user into a conducive ACo-Founder of Tacnik. He continues to say “The age-old saying from Confucius that goes ‘I hear I forget; I see I remember; I do I understand;’ is aptly applicable to the solutions that Tacnik develops using AR & VR.”

Tacnik one of the pioneers in experiential technologies has already developed solutions for its clients using immersive technologies. Skandha, Marketing head says, “One of our initial projects was a training module for a prominent manufacturing company. The use case was to train their factory workers on using complex, heavy and dangerous machinery cost-effectively

and safely. Tacnik developed a 2-fold approach of dissemination and assessment using VR, where we first showcased how to execute the processes perfectly including safety hazards and other crucial components in a 360-video format followed by an assessment module to test the knowledge gained by the trainees. The video also had overlays, content focus, and voice-overs in various languages to help train a diverse set of trainees from different backgrounds.” Skandha continues “The immersive 360 video was then proceeded by an assessment module that trainees were placed in, an experiential 3D environment, where they can play around with the machinery and apply what they have learned. A questionnaire is also implemented to test the fundamental knowledge that they should have gained. If any candidate fails, they get to retake the learning session and understand the process better.”.

“This solution was a huge success because of how safe it was for them to learn about the machinery along with learning the entire process within 30 mins, whereas the traditional approach used to take weeks!” says Purnank, Co-Founder and Product head of Tacnik. "The effectiveness of the training was complemented by our clients as they increased employee efficiency without large investments or drastic changes in their existing processes," says Purnank.

VR training is not restricted to just employees. External stakeholders such as distributors can also be trained on how certain products work, enabling them to understand the products better and hence improve sales. The scenarios of training in VR may be varied but the solutions convey the same: Immersive technologies are going to play a key role in how businesses function and with the increasing rate of adoption, don't be surprised if your next training session is in VR!