How to introduce immersive learning to your enterprise L&D program

Immersive learning for enterprises requires collaboration and cross-functional teamwork. Since an immersive learning platform can influence workforce transformation in so many ways, we’ve developed a checklist with recommendations for bringing immersive learning to enterprises, covering.

• How to articulate the value of immersive learning
• How to integrate with existing learning
• Who to involve in the immersive training program
• How to be successful

The benefits of immersive learning for enterprises

VR-based immersive learning capitalizes on proven best practices for behavioral learning and is based on decades of neuroscience research. By using VR to immerse employees into “real” work situations, Immersive Learning helps improve learner engagement, preparedness, knowledge retention, and confidence.

• Strengthens the brain’s connections to drive behavioral change and skills acquisition.
• Engages learners more powerfully through immersion and physical engagement.
• Enables repetition learning anywhere, anytime.
• Provides safe access to risky, hard to replicate situations.
• Enables unique, actionable data that help predict performance.

Immersive learning is already being used by some of the world’s largest companies, helping them solve key business objectives like operational efficiency, improving customer service, and practicing soft skills.

Explore Strivr customer stories.

And employees who train in VR love it. They get to build and practice new skills with innovative technology that boosts their confidence. Employees feel invested in, and create a deeper connection to the company.

Going through the VR and actually feeling like I’m physically in [the store] and making those decisions, it makes me feel very comfortable going straight to the sales floor because I’ve already done it.

— Walmart associate

Here is a checklist to bring immersive learning to your enterprise.

01. Articulate the value of immersive learning for your enterprise

Immersive Learning is not just another piece of training content. It will meaningfully impact your workforce in ways you may have never achieved or measured with traditional training. VR can engage and upskill employees for elevated levels of performance, and arm you with behavioral analytics that show clear ROI.

It’s important for executive leaders to understand how the results from Immersive Learning enable you to draw a direct line from learning to business impact. We’ve compiled over a dozen examples of how Strivr customers have done this in our ebook, Measuring the impact of Strivr’s immersive learning platform. The infographic below highlights some of the most impactful results.

‍

Immersive learning for enterprises can help transform workforce skills and prepare businesses for the future of work. Be sure to articulate this from the beginning.

02. Determine how immersive learning fits into your existing learning programs

Even though Immersive Learning for enterprises can be transformative, we don’t want to upend the dozens of important learning initiatives that you’ve worked so hard to implement. Workforce transformation is a journey.

That’s why we recommend evaluating what’s happening today and identifying pain points. Think of the Immersive Learning platform as an amazing new tool in your arsenal.

For example, Sprouts Farmers Market had very long onboarding process for new team members. They spent a lot of time teaching company values because it was important to their culture and customer experience. But hours of onboarding wasn’t proving to be as effective as they’d hoped. The company implemented immersive learning around values training as part of onboarding. While it didn’t replace the entire onboarding process, but significantly shortened the values portion while simultaneously making it more experiential and effective. With Immersive Learning, values training was reduced from four hours to 45 minutes, an 81% reduction.

Immersive Learning for enterprises can also help set a baseline of knowledge before getting on-the-job training. For warehouse employees, Immersive Learning provides a consistent, experiential baseline for how to perform a particular task. Then, new employees go out and shadow some of the most productive employees to continue learning in their first few weeks. The company saw productivity gains in the first week of implementing Immersive Learning.

The key takeaway here is that Immersive Learning for enterprises is additive to your existing training programs. It brings a level of experiential learning that helps reduce training times, boost speed to proficiency, and improve employee confidence.

03. Start planning your immersive learning governance board

First of all, what is an Immersive Learning Governance Board? It is a cross-functional team that works to establish alignment and communication around Immersive Learning for the enterprise. The governance board should be thinking about how an Immersive Learning platform fits into the long-term workforce plan.

Immersive learning governance boards almost always include:

• An L&D leader who champions the project
• A senior HR executive who is tapped into the learning and digital transformation roadmap
• The head of a business unit that is looking to accomplish critical objectives (i.e. improve store customer experience)

The most successful companies typically have 1-2 relentless champions for Immersive Learning who engage other internal leaders and drive alignment on VR, approach, and goals.

Logan Mulvey

Chief Customer Officer, Strivr

In addition, an Immersive Learning project eventually will need a technology expert. They’ll add perspective on how the Immersive Learning platform fits into the existing tech stack. You’ll also want to tap a resource in IT or security to help define requirements.

04. Review your company’s big business goals

At Strivr, Immersive Learning for enterprises is about helping to achieve the most critical business objectives. We recommend evaluating the various big business goals, as well as goals tied to specific business units, to see what you want to achieve. Our team of experts will help you understand how we can use the Immersive Learning platform to get there.

As part of that process, we’ll work together on building the business case for Immersive Learning. It will map out how the platform will impact your business goals and how we’ll use immersive behavioral data to measure and prove impact.

Immersive learning for enterprises is a team effort

Through our experience working with the world’s top enterprise customers, Strivr made this checklist to help you think critically about how to bring Immersive Learning to your company.

For more detailed information about the implementation process, download our free ebook: The Ultimate Guide to Immersive Learning.

Or reach out to our experts to start a discussion around your goals and initiatives.