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Measuring

Measuring VR Training Success

Proving the efficacy of virtual reality (VR) training remains a top concern for learning and development (L&D) professionals. But showing its value is key to including it in an L&D program on an ongoing basis and continuing to fund it. How can L&D professionals leverage VR training and tout its effectiveness to the C-suite? It’s all about keeping an eye on key measurements.

Tying Training Metrics to Organizational Goals

While the advantages of VR training may seem obvious, your program objectives must be tied to organizational goals to demonstrate value and prove its ability to deliver ROI.

The good news is that VR training integrates with learning management systems (LMS) and generates multiple data points, so showing its impact is easy. The key is to align the data to business goals and create a narrative about training that the C-suite will understand.

To help L&D professionals do this, we modified Kirkpatrick’s Training Evaluation model to make these four levels more relevant to VR training:

Engagement: How engaging and relevant the trainee found the training program
Comprehension: How well did the trainee retain and comprehend the training materials
Speed to Competency: How well was the trainee able to apply the information learned
Outcome: How trainee results contribute to the organization’s bottom line

Let’s take a look at this framework in action.

Engagement
Measuring employee engagement is a vital component for determining VR training success because of the correlation between engagement and retention. If the content is interesting and relevant, trainees are more likely to retain the information.

Due to its immersive nature, VR is more engaging to employees when compared to passive forms of training such as videos or workbooks. VR training leverages gamification to make learning new concepts fun and easier to understand.

When trying to quantify the success of your VR training program’s engagement, use a post-training survey to collect responses. Ask employees questions like:

How easy was it to use?
How helpful were the VR training materials?
How impactful was VR training?

Comprehension
One of the biggest challenges of any training program is determining if trainees are learning. VR training makes that easier; it generates data that shows how engaged the user is by documenting:

Training frequency and completion
Interactions in the training module itself (movement, clicks, and focus)
Proficiency in performing tasks in the simulated environment

L&D professionals also can include comprehension exams in the learning modules that require trainees to pass with satisfactory scores before moving on to the next section. If a large percentage of trainees scores low on that specific module, tweaks can be made to that particular area without having to create a new training program.

Speed to Competency
The goal of any training program is to quickly and efficiently teach employees with new skills they need to do the job. To measure speed to competency, it’s important to look at what the organization is trying to achieve and how VR training will help achieve that goal. For manufacturers, the goal may be to reduce the number of manmade errors on the line. For an airline, it may be decreasing the time it takes to turn around planes.

By measuring speed to competency, organizations can see how fast employees master skills and get back on the job. Metrics to measure can include:

Duration: The length of time it takes to master a new skill
Retention: Retesting after a period of time to gauge retention
Proficiency: Improvement in employee performance

Outcome
There are many benefits to VR training, but the C-suite is looking for how the training program helps improve the bottom line. When determining how successful VR training is, it’s essential to focus on metrics that speak to what the organization is trying to achieve, such as:

Productivity: Did productivity grow due to less downtime for employees and the equipment?
Savings: Was there a reduction in training-related travel and expenses?
Efficiency: Have work-related accidents been reduced?
Retention: Are employees staying with the company longer?

Data to Support Every Stage of Training

Leveraging data at each stage of VR training demonstrates its value to internal stakeholders. You don’t have to wait for months, or even until training is completed, to start measuring value. You can gauge comprehension and speed to competency during training. You can poll trainees about engagement immediately after. And measuring outcomes—the goal of any training—can start from the day training is completed and employees are on the job.

Introducing VR training into an enterprise can be challenging, even in organizations with sophisticated L&D programs. Whatever the concerns—integration into existing training, implementation, cost—careful consideration and dissemination of appropriate metrics to show its effectiveness can pave the road to acceptance of new VR solutions.

Quelle:

https://www.td.org/insights/measuring-vr-training-success

3. Februar 2021 0 comment

Knowledge Research

How to Measure Training Effectiveness of Virtual Reality

It is estimated that poor quality training ends up costing companies nearly $13.5 million per year for every 1,000 employees trained, Furthermore, a 2015 study by Microsoft found that the average person loses attention after only 8 seconds. These numbers are staggering, and it makes you really wonder if there is a better way to optimize onboarding processes for hiring new employees as well as training current ones.

For companies to avoid losing customers, money, or more, it is important to be able to quantify the effectiveness of an organization’s training program. In this article, we are going to look at the best ways to measure the benefits of using tools like augmented and virtual reality for employee process training in a variety of ways.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Corporate Training Programs

Professor Donald Kirkpatrick developed and published the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model in 1959. The Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model has become one of the most widely applied methods for organizations to determine if a training program is successful or unsuccessful at training employees. The model has four basic steps.

Reaction: How the participants felt about the training program. What type of response does the program elicit from them?

Learning: How much knowledge or skills the participants gained. How much have they retained?

Behavior: The degree to which participants applied what they learned.

Results: The benefits the business sees as a result of the training. What does the business get out of the training investment?

Reaction

Perhaps the most obvious challenge in creating a training program is to create one which employees and new staff respond to. It is all the common that employees view training programs as a waste of time, a day of boredom, or an easy paid day. To pass step one of the Kirkpatrick model the training program must be able to elicit a positive reaction from the employees. It needs to engage them, keep them concentrated, and keep away the boredom.

This is where an obvious benefit of a VR training program can be seen. Because VR is immersive by nature it can be used to create training programs that check all of those boxes; it keeps employees engaged, concentrated and occupied the entire time, unlike traditional lecture-based training methods. It is also a new and unique way to give a fresh perspective to lacklustre and outdated methods that simply don’t captivate or foster a positive learning experience.

Learning

Another major challenge to having an effective training program is determining whether or not individuals are learning what is being taught. The most standard metric to determining an employee has learned from the training program is a standard competency exam. If scores are low, or undesirable, the entire program needs to be improved, done again, or both.

With full-scale immersive technology learning modules, you are able to build tests and proficiency exams right into the experience, as well as being able to push the results to a backend LMS or database. The end result is a much more streamlined and efficient learning process that will save money in the long-term and promote better learning outcomes overall.

VR allows an organization to create competency tests that closely mimic real-life working conditions. It also allows for examination of exactly which parts of the training program employees are learning from and which parts they are not. If employees, as a whole, perform poorly in a specific aspect under VR conditions, it can be determined that it is that portion of the training program which is lacking and needs to be redone.

Virtual and augmented reality has been used by many leading industries in the past few years for training exercises, so we can see adoption is on the rise. From manufacturing, aerospace, defence, energy and automotive, we have seen training programs executed successfully across the board. Pilots, especially commercial pilots, have used flight simulators for years to determine if they have fully grasped the knowledge, they have learned in training programs. It has been through this use of VR type training that pilot training has become so standardized and effective over the years. Pilots can train for scenarios that are too dangerous and life-threatening to train for in a real-life setting.

Another VR training example implemented more recently is UPS, and how they train their drivers for all sorts of conditions and hazards using VR technology. With VR, employers can gauge if an employee has truly learned their required tasks before entering the workforce.

Here at VR Vision, we have developed countless full-scale training platforms for our clients and partners. One of the better training rollouts for us has been with Toyota Motors Manufacturing, where we are training around 10,000 employees on hazard identification and safety protocols and procedures.

This has equated to a reduction in speed to onboard new employees as well as lowered their incident rates. In turn, this leads to less downtime for production and higher ROI for their manufacturing plants overall.

Behavior

The third requirement in Kirkpatrick’s Evaluation model is behaviorally based, to phrase it another way “does the employees’ behaviour positively improve in response to the training they are receiving?”

This is answered by looking at the key performance indicators (KPI) that are outlined before the training scenario even begins. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages. Essentially, the business picks a metric, a way of measuring something they want to achieve and determine if they have in fact achieved it.

For example, a car company might want to have a zero-defect month, a restaurant may want 3 more people certified in food safety, and a construction company might want 3 more people trained on a boom lift. KPI’s are simply the goals a company sets and uses to measure whether or not they have met that goal.

This principle can be applied to XR (AR & VR) training, but instead of losing productivity and money having the KPI’s met in the workplace, employees can train in an extended reality where mistakes are much less costly (or harmful), and be made ready for optimal performance in the workplace. Furthermore, it is easier to meet KPIs when the employee has already achieved them in a virtual setting, as VR especially lends well to increased learning efficacy and overall higher knowledge retention rates.

Results

The fourth principle in Kirkpatrick’s model is the results. This can be defined in many ways but the most essential way of defining results is “what does the organization receive from training employees?”. What does the business get from the investment made in training employees?

Training new employees are always one of the more costly aspects of operating a business. Replacing an employee can cost six to nine months of their salary, this cost is seen in both the decrease in production from departed employees and the cost ramping up the newly on-boarded employee. The new employee is not expected to meet full productivity until over 6 months of taking the job, resulting in further financial loses.

Once again, VR helps here. As laid out above, VR can increase learning times meaning new employees can reach full efficiency sooner, resulting in less financial loss for the business. Employees often complain that they are not sure how to use their training, or that their training does not seem to apply to the real-world setting. Giving employees the ability to test out their training and feel confident about it improves employee satisfaction and leads to lower turnover rates, which in turn leads to increased productivity by reducing requires training times and costs associated with new employees

Integrate VR Into Your Training

With VR technology at a point where it has become so immersive and realistic, there has never been a better time to implement augmented reality or virtual reality into your organizations’ training program and enjoy the benefits of more productive and efficient employees with less time from training to the workplace than ever before.

How to Measure Training Effectiveness of Virtual Reality

Quelle:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-measure-training-effectiveness-virtual-reality-roni-cerga/

23. Januar 2020 0 comment