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Published in Winter 2024
If you’ve ever endured an online training session with endless slideshows, you know how quickly it can become disengaging and dull. You might run through the training at 2X speed and multitask — or just switch off mentally — while it runs in the background.
After a brief test, your training is complete, and you forget everything minutes later as your mind shifts to other tasks. The consensus is clear: traditional online training can be inefficient and uninspiring.
This is precisely why immersive technology, specifically virtual reality (VR), is gaining ground. Immersive technology doesn’t just make you an observer, it brings you into the learning experience. VR, along with augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), collectively known as extended reality (XR), offers a new dimension of “switched-on” learning.
Growing Popularity of VR
VR training is probably historically known best in the case of flight simulation. Organizations like NASA, the United States Air Force and Boeing have long used VR flight simulators to train pilots, driven by the immense cost of real aircraft and the high stakes involved in pilot training.
Health care is another field where VR training has flourished. Medical students can practice surgical procedures on virtual patients, offering a risk-free environment for learning. Other industries, such as firefighting, the military, manufacturing and customer service have adopted VR training for various reasons, including safety concerns, cost savings and the ability to create diverse training scenarios without real-world logistics.
Advantages of VR Training
Before delving into the challenges, it’s essential to understand why organizations are turning to VR training despite the obstacles. VR’s primary advantage is engagement. When you put on a VR headset, you’re fully immersed in the training experience, free from external distractions.
VR enables instructors to use experiential learning, teaching through practice rather than passive memorization. This aligns with adult learning theory, which emphasizes “learning by doing” through role-playing and simulations.
From an organizational perspective, the most significant advantage of VR training is efficiency. Experiential learning reduces training hours. According to PwC research, VR training can be up to four times faster than traditional classroom training, ensuring employees get back to their tasks sooner.
Challenges and Solutions of Implementing Virtual Reality Training
While there are many benefits, it’s the challenges that can quickly derail your efforts to add VR to your training programs. Let’s examine five challenges and solutions.
Challenge 1: Employee Familiarity and Resistance
It is true the popularity of VR has grown over the years, but a large section of the working population has never tried it. Human beings are naturally hesitant about new technology. Adding VR as a new training tool may worry some of your employees rather than excite them.
Overcoming this challenge is all about a gradual addition that can help prepare your workforce. Rather than changing your entire program, consider adding a 15-minute simulation to the tail-end of a training session. Robust instructional design considering the “why” behind implementing this new technology goes a long way in making VR-enhanced training palatable.
Challenge 2: Measuring ROI
Justifying investment in a new way of training can be challenging. Nevertheless, VR’s inherent capabilities can help learning and development (L&D) and human resources (HR) professionals champion its implementation.
VR training reduces training time, often dramatically. When Walmart first implemented VR into its training program, the most dramatic reduction they saw was a 30- to 45-minute training session becoming only a 3- to 5-minute VR simulation.
In addition, VR technology can track user engagement, providing insights into which parts of the training are effective, making return on investment (ROI) measurement more straightforward.
Highlight learning metrics, such as faster speed to skill, greater knowledge retention and self-efficacy, and greater engagement, which improves the bottom line.
Challenge 3: Initial Costs
Adding VR to your training sessions, like any other upgrade, has an upfront cost. You’ll have to purchase headsets, get them set up and secured and develop simulations or virtual environments for live training sessions.
The benefit is that the biggest portion of this cost is front-loaded. The longer you keep the program going and the more areas of your company participate, the less it costs you in the long run.
Bringing all your employees together for coaching or training sessions is costly. According to PwC, at only 375 learners, using VR reached cost parity with in-person training. Above that number and you’re saving a substantial amount of money over annual or quarterly in-person sessions.
When looking at upfront costs of deploying new technology, consider the economies of scale: VR helps you deliver and scale training faster and cheaper.
Challenge 4: Content Creation and Customization
The extent of content customization can influence costs significantly. Some organizations require simple, off-the-shelf simulations or shared virtual spaces. Others opt for highly customized experiences, such as team-building activities or virtual replicas of company headquarters.
If you’re only experimenting with VR in your training, you would be better off trying a simple implementation to start. Begin with a readily available, or “off-the-shelf,” simulation. You can also have your team enter an existing team-building activity.
Remember, it’s not enough to just have a VR platform without thinking through content. Use existing off-the-shelf VR training solutions and build internal capacity for upskilling on VR-enhanced instructional design.
Challenge 5: Inclusivity Limitations
People with disabilities should have every opportunity to work and thrive in a positive environment that celebrates our differences. VR as we know it today requires vision and various levels of mobility. Can VR meet ADA compliance requirements?
According to the CDC, up to 1 in 4 adults in the United States have some form of disability. While implementing VR, we must understand how it can adjust to disabilities or provide an alternative for people whose disability makes VR participation impossible. To accommodate users with disabilities, adjustments such as altering the visual spectrum and providing audio notifications can help.
Bottom line: Despite how much you may champion VR, you will need an alternative to ensure your company remains an inclusive place of business.
Make sure your VR solution provides options for accommodating hearing, vision and other kinds of disability, both while using the headset and creating an inclusive non-headset option for participating.
Final Thoughts
All indications point to our world moving toward a mixed reality experience in which we interact with digital objects and spaces even while in our physical space. This is already visible in advertising, product testing and commuting.
Corporate training is also moving in this direction. Companies like Walmart, Liberty Financial, and Bank of America are already implementing VR in their training programs. The benefits of using virtual reality in L&D are clear but in order to successfully implement VR in training, your company must be aware of the challenges and plan ways of overcoming these hurdles.