VR for Training is the fastest growing use case among InstaVR Enterprise clients.

They’re excited by the immersive, interactive, memorable nature of virtual reality. They’re excited by the ability to elicit empathy in an unparalleled way outside of actual human interaction. They’re excited by the ability to have employees learn without having to travel hundreds or thousands of miles, saving them countless hours and dollars.

There has been many news articles about Fortune 500 companies using VR for Training in the last several years. Big name companies — Walmart, UPS, Boeing — with large workforces, where even a small increase in productivity can have a huge impact. All of the major consultancies – PwC, Deloitte, Accenture — have dedicated teams focused on Virtual Reality, with many of their individual offices already using InstaVR to easily and quickly make VR presentations and apps.

So now that you feel it’s your time to start using VR for Training — how do you know if your Learning & Development department is ready?

The easiest way to find out is to schedule a consultation with our sales team via the Contact Us option on this page. But outside of that, there are some broad activities undertaken by the aforementioned Fortune 500 companies and multi-national companies to successfully integrate VR into their training curriculums.

The good news is your Learning and Development department doesn’t need any Virtual Reality or technical experience to start using InstaVR. It’s more about attitude, process, and planning.

So we’ll discuss three main attributes that our successful InstaVR Enterprise clients all share before deploying VR training apps to hundreds or thousands of employees on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. If you have any questions, let us know!

The biggest reason VR for Training programs fail is not the technology. It’s the enthusiasm to use, build, and deploy VR applications.

And usually the culprit is not having a defined person in charge of VR for Training at a company. Perhaps at the VP level they read about VR for Training successes at another company, or saw a cool VR for Training app at a conference, and they assign a division (often the Learning & Development team) to look into the technology. That’s great!

But to really utilize VR, you need 1-2 people who are really enthusiastic about VR and take ownership.

Why?

Because it’s one thing to show a cool VR training app built by someone else. But when it comes to building them — though technologically, quite simple with InstaVR — it still takes legwork. You still have to do the filming, capturing the audio, building custom logos, publishing, distributing, etc.

The success of a program often comes from one thing — ACCOUNTABILITY. If you have 1-2 people who are accountable, who add “Building out VR Training applications” to the top of their job description on their resumes, you’re in good hands.

We can train anyone how to build VR apps. We can train anyone how to deploy them. What’s harder to train is enthusiasm and determination. Those are two features of our favorite InstaVR Enterprise clients.

2. Do you have Success Metrics in place to achieve with your VR for Training program?

Let’s be honest — it’s really cool to experience virtual reality technology!

The key to adding it to your training program though is using similar metrics to your other trainings (paper, video, in-person, etc) to determine what is working and not working. And how effectively each employee is performing with the VR Training.

I’ve seen a few companies “dabble” in VR for Training with no stated goals. The problem is you then have no way to report back to the C-Suite on its effectiveness, and gain even more investment for the technology.

With InstaVR, there are many ways to gauge effectiveness of VR for Training. This includes our expansive Analytics, which tell you every action taken by a user within your VR apps. Combined with the new feature allowing a User to enter an ID in InstaVR — you can see who started an app, how long they were in it, what scenes they initiated, and when they completed it. All from simple analytics.

You can also add Questions + Answers to scenes. This helps reinforce the training that you’re doing, and gives you solid feedback on whether VR Training is providing more memorable and impactful trainings than your other non in-person training techniques (hint: it should).

Very soon, we’ll also have integrations to announce with major players in the HR Technology space. This will allow you to see all of the VR metrics in the same location you see your non-VR Training metrics, giving you a more comprehensive look at the impact of your VR trainings.

Bottom line: don’t start building VR apps within your Learning & Development team until you have success metrics you’d like to achieve. Without goals, you have no way of proving to others that what you’re doing is having a positive impact.

3. Do you have a schedule for deployment of VR Training apps?

The last tip we’ll give you is to put in place a schedule for distributing your VR Training program apps. Make it a consistent thing — be it one new app bi-weekly, monthly, whatever.

We’ve definitely had a client put together one great VR Training app… then that’s it. VR for Training withers on the vine at their company. They rest on their laurels of that one great app, and the feedback they received from it, without moving onto the next VR Training app.

The reason this happens is often a lack of blueprint for future training apps. Create a calendar with release goals on it. Schedule certain days for shooting, certain days for editing in InstaVR, certain days for publishing, certain days for getting feedback.

VR for Training shouldn’t — and in the future, likely won’t be — a one-off event at your company. You want to integrate the technology just like you would an online course. You wouldn’t only ever create one online training course, would you?

It’s best to start with attainable release goals — start with one per month for the first six months. Then you can get more aggressive with bi-weekly or weekly releases. Or focus new trainings on new departments.

If you start with realistic deployment goals, and hit them, you’ll be more likely to gain the trust and faith of the C-level decision makers who can give you more human capital and financial investment.

Then once things are going along at a strong pace, you can put together a team — maybe 3 people, maybe 10, maybe more — who are solely focused on creation of VR Trainings. But starting with attainable deployment goals, and hitting them, is a big momentum builder.

4. Conclusion

Most Learning & Development departments are technically ready for VR Training. An InstaVR Enterprise account — along with a 360-degree camera and VR headsets — is all you need. You (or your team) can literally can be creating VR Training apps and publishing them tomorrow using InstaVR.

But to truly succeed, you want to put building blocks in place to make sure you maximize the technology and get back the highest ROI.

To do that, we strongly suggest the three above actions be put into place — have 1-2 people spearheading the VR Training program with some real skin in the game, establish goals/metrics for your VR Training program to hit (even at launch), and set a realistic deployment schedule so you can keep up momentum after early successes.

As we stated towards the top of this article, our sales consulting team is happy to share learnings from working with some very successful companies that employed these techniques when launching their VR Training programs. The question isn’t if your Learning & Development team can build immersive and impactful VR Training apps — it’s whether you can put in place the structure for the program to succeed!