Jason is the CEO of Sozo Labs, focusing on building VR and immersive apps that deliver real business value for their customers.
The World Economic Forum ranked creative thinking, agility and flexibility, and empathy and active listening within the most important skills for workers in 2023. Teamwork, compassion in leadership and clear communication are also essential skills employees will need over the coming years. What’s becoming increasingly apparent is the focus on these soft skills and, while certainly still necessary, the veering away from hard or technical skills.
But there is nothing “soft” about soft skills; they are often considered the hardest skills to learn because they are challenging to master and take a long time before we can start using them confidently in our day-to-day lives. That’s largely because they are used by people to impact other people.
Thirty years ago, when I started my career as a software engineer, I always used to think that everything I built would be so much easier if the people weren’t involved. But the reality is that great people, great cultures and great leaders are the lifeblood of a successful business, and sitting at the heart of all of these are soft skills.
As the CEO of Sozo Labs, an immersive technology company, a big question I asked myself is, could the very technology disruption that’s driving the focus on soft skills hold the solution to the problem itself?
It sounds counterintuitive, but this is not as uncommon as you might think in the technology world. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) has raised concerns about job displacement, yet AI itself is also being harnessed to create new job opportunities.
In the same vein, I think technologies like AI and virtual reality (VR) hold the key to helping businesses solve the demand for soft skills in a scalable and impactful way.
Why should you care?
The need for soft skills isn’t going anywhere, yet I’ve noticed the way people are learning these skills isn’t keeping up with the demand. Technology has always solved the issue of scale for business, and as businesses look for ways to scale these skills, I think we will see an increasing focus and adoption of AI and VR experiences.
I’m talking about experiences designed to mirror real-world scenarios and put the person inside the scenario so they can learn on their feet, think critically about how to navigate complex situations safely and learn faster.
If you are in a business that is looking for soft skills training at scale and with impact, what can you do?
1. Understand that any learning has to solve a critical business metric or need.
Whether you offer in-house training, hire external consultants or are thinking about immersive technologies, the same rule applies. If there is no clear link between the training and a hard business metric, then it’s not going to move the needle and have an impact on your business.
Stop measuring course completion or attendance and start measuring things that matter and result in positive behavior change. Ask instead how learning is delivering against a real business metric, such as revenue, growth, cost efficiencies or customer experience, to name a few.
2. Be strategic when using VR to deliver applied learning.
VR is being used more commonly in learning applications because it allows experiential (applied) learning to happen at scale. It can mirror the same three-dimensional world that we live in and apply our skills within.
Look at your existing training, and see where applying VR can benefit. I would recommend taking a blended approach. Don’t replace your existing content with VR. Use VR where it shines, as a tool to enhance learning effectiveness.
When using VR to simulate real-world interactions, provide a host of narrative-driven scenarios. From here, the learner can practice until they feel that they have confidently mastered the content.
If you aren’t sure whether VR will be the right tool to solve the problem or are thinking you can spend less money on a mainstream generic learning solution, consider that traditional training can build knowledge, but VR through repetition can build confidence and mastery.
VR is an emerging technology, and as such, there aren’t thousands of case studies, which means it’s a tough sell in the board room. But remember, like any technology, VR is just a tool, and if a tool is used incorrectly, it won’t be effective.
If you are not able to clearly define the problem you are having, then you shouldn’t be looking at any technology to solve that solution. But, if you can clearly articulate your problem and part of your problem statement deals with a need for repeatable and consistent training, building confidence, dealing with lack of resources for training and teaching soft skills effectively, VR might be a good solution for you.
3. Weigh the costs of new technology against the impact.
A common criticism leveled at any new technology, including VR, is that it is too expensive. And the further away a technology sits from the revenue-generating side of the business, the louder this criticism becomes.
The simple answer is VR and AI will cost money, but like any technology, this should be weighed against their impact. VR shines when it comes to teaching complex new frameworks and ideas, specifically where you need to move from rote learning to applied learning.
It’s in this transition that I see people struggle the most, having to apply a textbook approach to the new content they have learned. This is where you see the master vs. student—a journey that often takes months or years, but with VR can be accelerated to days or weeks.
So, instead of asking, “Is VR really expensive?” we should ask, “Can we use it appropriately as a business and in what context?”
VR is not a silver bullet. No technology—not even AI—is a silver bullet. Any technology has a time and a place, and if you understand the impact that VR and AI can have on accelerating the application of learning safely and effectively for long-term impact, you can start to see how it could arm your business to deal effectively with the demand for the critical skills needed to navigate the future of work.
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