How do VR training programmes measure up? As immersive technologies are increasingly being adopted as a learning tool, how effective are they at ensuring employees remain highly skilled and productive? As learning & development budgets are increasingly stretched, demonstrating the true benefit of any training experience is crucial.
This includes assessing long term individual behavioural changes and business impact through empirical evidence and qualitative feedback. Additionally, virtual reality also offers new ways to measure an individual’s reaction, as well as their performance and learning during the training experience – and beyond.
Training with purpose: what does success look like?
What do you want your employees to learn and how do you want this to have a positive effect on their workplace performance? And how do you see this impacting on overall business productivity? Identifying the current working practices as a baseline and the measurable learning outcomes you want to achieve will give you a framework for measuring the effectiveness of your VR training programme.
Watch and learn: monitoring performance during the training programme
A key benefit of VR training is that people learn more effectively by actively doing. As workplace environments and challenges can be accurately replicated in a virtual space, monitoring performance throughout a training session can provide crucial evidence for the effectiveness of the experience.
Performance measurement tools are an integral part of VR learning platforms, such as Future Visual’s VISIONxR. Combined with headsets and hand controllers, this offer non-evasive tech solutions to measure information such as clicks, movement and eye tracking, as well as time taken and repetitions needed to complete tasks.
These insights offer a wealth of useful data on the user experience and the effectiveness of the training. Actively engaged learners develop skills more rapidly and retain knowledge for longer, so monitoring interactions, reactions, engagement and proficiency during the training session can help you to assess if the training course is impactful. It will also help to indicate where content isn’t quite right and where changes might need to be introduced.
Asking the right questions: surveys & qualitative feedback
As your employees are at the heart of any training programme, getting their honest views on your VR course is essential. More traditional evaluation techniques, such as post-training surveys and opinion-based qualitative feedback are ideal for collecting this critical information.
Ask questions such as whether the training was worth their time, was it engaging, what the strengths and weaknesses were, what they learned and how they will apply this learning in the workplace.
By collecting this data, you will be able to collate your employees’ reactions to the training. This can also help to indicate if the course is truly addressing the issues that you have identified – and where changes may be needed. It can also help to build a picture of unquantifiable, but impactful learning outcomes, such as improving your employee’s confidence in carrying out tasks.
Putting it into practice: post-course assessment of performance
Having a great training experience that is successfully completed by the learner is great, but applying that learning into the workplace environment to improve performance is the ultimate goal. Over the weeks and months after the training has taken place, measuring performance against an individual’s personal development plan gives line managers the chance to assess modifications in behaviour. Have they integrated newly acquired skills into their work? Are they working more efficiently and making less errors?
The great thing about VR training is that experiences can be easily repeated by learners with minimal impact on your training budget and downtime. By re-visiting virtual training exercises, key indicators such as knowledge retention, as well as improved competencies carrying out specific tasks can be tested over a longer period.
Good for business? The impact of training on company performance
Great training interventions should have a positive impact on your organisation. As there are numerous factors influencing company-wide performance, measuring the strategic impact of training is challenging. However, by monitoring KPIs, such as increasing staff retention, improving productivity and minimising downtime, you may be able to track correlations between improved company performance and the impact of your training programme.
Conclusion
Introducing engaging and effective training programmes is at the heart of any learning & development strategy, especially for businesses who are committed to developing the potential of their employees, as well as improving skills and productivity levels. By putting measures in place to evaluate the impact of VR training courses, it allows companies to see the tangible benefits of immersive training – and how it can be used to help your company to thrive and grow.
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