EMBARKING ON A DIGITAL EVOLUTION: IMMERSIVE LEARNING'S ROLE IN BRIDGING THE SKILLS GAP

In a rapidly digitalising world, change is good – and not just good, it’s increasingly vital to survival and evolution. The process of evolving industry training solutions to address the massive skills gap (87 per cent of businesses reported a ‘significant skills shortage’ according to a June 2016 report from the World Economic Forum) is essential, and immersive learning solutions with scenarios that are immersive, safe and repeatable offer a significant and exciting way forward.

THE JOURNEY TO IMMERSIVE LEARNING EXCELLENCE

Understanding the Need for a Skills Revolution

Indeed, the digital transformation process has created exponential demand for new skills, and reversed many traditional training approaches upside down. Amid the uncertain shift in training modes brought on by the pandemic, hybrid and remote cultures are making it even more difficult to provide every employee with realistic opportunities to receive training.

Charting the Course for Immersive Learning

These immersive learning solutions, which harness the power of virtual training environments using emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR) are the saviour in this situation. By allowing learners to conduct job-related training on immersive modules, these solutions provide a safe training ground to acquire skills and gain experience that otherwise come only as a costly investment in real-world training.

TAILORING IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES TO CLOSE THE SKILLS GAP

Identifying and Demonstrating Skill Needs

In order to identify specific skill deficiencies, companies have to first define the desired behaviours or skills required for effective job performance. Immersive learning systems have a unique ability to directly measure those behaviours and then provide that feedback in real time, which turns out to be a key to skill development and improvement.

Adjusting Training to Reflect Real-world Contexts

The immersive learning journey is also affected by the context in which those skills are applied. In some instances, the best way to react may differ depending on the socio-cultural environment surrounding the performance of these skills. Therefore, immersive learning programmes can be structured to replicate the variety of contexts that an employee may find him- or herself in, and thereby prepare employees for a far greater array of challenges.

THE SCALABILITY JOURNEY OF IMMERSIVE LEARNING PLATFORMS

Making Learning Accessible and Effective for All

To achieve widespread impact for immersive learning technologies, they will need to become scalable and available. That means achieving compatibility across multiple hardware and software platforms, lowering the cost of implementation, and supporting open standards for content creation and measurement of learner outcomes.

ENSURING CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT THROUGH DATA ANALYTICS

There’s a tendency when discussing immersive learning to get lost in a discussion of content – how to best instruct participants in the key points of a training session, leveraging methods such as gamification to hold their attention. However, even more importantly, immersive learning represents an evolving path to understand how things are learned and how that can be improved. By mining information from immersive learning sessions, organisations can more precisely identify where learning fails to produce the desired outcomes, and personalise experiences and interventions to improve them. Only then can we begin to transform training from a dull, largely forgettable experience, into a continuum of productive engagement that actually brings staff closer to their goals.

THE FUTURE JOURNEY OF IMMERSIVE LEARNING

As emerging immersive technologies become viable, the potential applications for education and industry are unlimited, with the path toward standard immersive learning solutions in training already well underway.

UNDERSTANDING "JOURNEY" IN THE CONTEXT OF IMMERSIVE LEARNING

The ‘journey’ in this article represents the dynamic process of choosing fit-for-purpose immersive learning solutions to meet the ever-changing skills needs of the workforce, covering a wide range of actions from assessing skill gaps, tailoring learning programmes for impact, scaling at scale and speed, and using data systems to measure and improve learning results.

FAQS ABOUT THE JOURNEY WITH GIZMOGO

How Can Gizmogo Help in the Immersive Learning Journey?

Gizmogo is a crucial facilitator of disruptive technologies that are empowering organisations to become spatial learners by enabling them to build realistic simulations or augmented training scenarios that can be utilised for training across enterprises. At present, Gizmogo focuses on providing the necessary technologies of the future – VR and AR tools – for companies to start business training through simulations or transform the traditional manner of conducting workplace training.

What Makes Immersive Learning a Preferable Journey?

Through immersive learning, skill acquisition is highly engaging and more effective compared with textbook learning where the same material might be considered boring and purposeless. The ability to practise and make mistakes in a risk-free environment is the key strength of immersive learning. This approach maximises recall and additionally creates a sense of genuine experiential learning that results in a deeper learning experience.

How Does Gizmogo Ensure the Scalability of Immersive Training Programs?

Gizmogo’s offerings are designed with scalability in mind, by leveraging cloud-based technologies to deploy all the solutions at all locations and teams in order to keep the training consistent and the immersive learning experience accessible to more people worldwide.

Can Gizmogo Tailor Immersive Learning Pathways for Individual Skill Gaps?

Yes, by analysing each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and offering personalised training content, we can adjust training based on each individual’s needs in order to maximise the learning impact.

How Does Gizmogo Use Data to Improve the Immersive Learning Journey?

It uses this data to glean insights about learner performance, spot trends and identify improvement opportunities, all based on the learning, practice and measurement that happens in the real world. MMOs are well equipped to address what 21st-century corporate learning needs.

EMBRACING THE FUTURE OF LEARNING

And so, we stare down the barrel of a new era of professional training and development. We are, truly and earnestly, advancing in a collective, technology-driven leap toward the future of learning. The creation of skills really is that crucial. And the skills gap is indeed all that separates the ones who accept that this future is here, now, from those who reject it. Where are you standing? You can find new and more affordable devices, offering untapped ways for your team and yourself to learn, at Gizmogo.com.