Revolutionising Soft Skills Training

Immersive technologies (augmented, virtual and mixed reality) have been attracting much attention as offering innovative solutions to support training in hard-skills contexts. Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson coined the DICE acronym to cover the range of activities that lent themselves to training in VR.

• Dangerous: such as training crane operators using simulators.
• Impossible: such as interacting with historical figures, or exploring distant planets
• Counter-productive: such as using VR to simulate the effects of flooding on the environment.
• Expensive: for example VR or AR can be used to reduce travel costs hugely for many training scenarios.

While the DICE acronym has particular resonance with regards to hard-skills and knowledge development, the use of immersive technologies has now been expanding greatly in assisting in developing employability skills in areas such as presentation skills, customer empathy, diversity awareness, leadership development, and team-building.

The fusion of AI technology into existing VR training tools is set to herald an exciting new era of technology aiding those in the corporate training sector. Perhaps unsurprisingly among the most enthusiastic adopters of the technology are those in the consulting space. Accenture announced recently that they were acquiring 60,000 VR headsets to enable a richer onboarding and training experience for their new recruits.

Another company heavily invested in VR for training is PWC. VR training platforms like Talespin's CoPilot were used in a PWC study in 2000 which focused on diversity and inclusion training, creating realistic scenarios and using virtual human-like avatars for role-playing, leading to higher engagement and emotional connection with the content.

According to the study, VR learning content fosters a 3.75 times greater emotional connection compared to classroom learning and 2.3 times greater than e-learning. The same study also showed VR-trained employees also exhibit a 275% increase in confidence to apply their learned skills compared to other training methods and allows employees to complete training up to four times faster than traditional classroom learning and 1.5 times faster than e-learning.

Before exploring specific use cases for immersive technologies, it’s worth considering the theoretical basis for how they can aid in learning. Immersive technologies create highly engaging, multisensory environments that simulate real-world scenarios. According to cognitive learning theories such as educationalist Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience, people retain more information when they "do" rather than just "read" or "hear." VR and AR allow learners to actively participate in scenarios, making decisions and experiencing consequences in real time. This experiential learning approach enhances memory retention, emotional engagement, and the transfer of skills to real-world context.

For example, VR simulations might place a user in high-stakes sales presentation scenarios requiring them to practice active delivery, voice pacing, tone and intonation, audience contact, and listening skills. Until recently such simulation scenarios relied heavily on a limited number of ‘branching scenarios’ that were presented to the trainee. This clearly had limitations compared to practicing in a real-world scenario. However, AI is set to allow a highly personalised approach to training, offering them immediate feedback, and scope to offer many opportunities to retake the training multiple times – something that’s hard to replicate in person-to-person contexts. Younger generations also have appreciation for the gamification elements that can be built into many of the learning experiences. For many the ability to undertake the training on their own, and at their own pace, is a highly attractive dimension of technology. There are a number of other key use-cases for the technologies.

Emotional Intelligence: AR and VR can present emotionally charged scenarios, training users to recognise and respond to non-verbal cues. Some of the scenarios would be impossible in a real-world context.

Leadership Development: Simulations can replicate crisis management scenarios or team leadership situations, allowing users to test strategies and receive feedback.

Cultural Sensitivity: Immersive environments can expose users to diverse cultural contexts, enhancing global collaboration skills. By placing users in the virtual shoes of another person - known as ‘embodiment’ - whether it's a colleague, customer, or someone from a different background- VR enables experiential learning that goes beyond traditional methods. This embodied experience allows users to feel what it's like to face a problem from another viewpoint, fostering empathy, reducing bias, and enhancing understanding.

We have seen an accelerated adoption of immersive technologies with the integration of AI capabilities into the training process. This is facilitating the training in a number of key ways.

Personalised Learning Paths: AI algorithms can analyse a learner’s performance, preferences, and progress to tailor scenarios that target specific weaknesses or goals. For instance, if a user struggles with assertiveness, the system can generate more scenarios that challenge and develop that trait.

Real-Time Feedback and Analytics: Business-level VR headsets can track eye movement, speech patterns, decision-making speed, and emotional responses to provide immediate, data-driven feedback. This level of objective insight is difficult to achieve in traditional training environments.

Scalable Collaboration: AI-powered avatars and virtual agents can simulate realistic interactions, enabling learners to practice conversations and negotiations without needing a human counterpart. This makes training accessible anytime, anywhere, and to anyone who has access to a VR headset.

Cost-Effective Deployment: By automating facilitation and feedback, AI potentially reduces the need for human trainers, making high-quality soft skills training more affordable and scalable across large organisations. It should be acknowledged that the PWC study did estimate that VR training achieved cost-parity with in-person training when delivered to 375 trainees, and cost-parity with e-learning delivery platforms when the number of learners exceeded 1950. It should be noted this finding was before the advent of AI which will have significantly reduced the cost of content creation, and analytics.

Despite the obvious promise of immersive technologies to deliver soft skills training, several challenges remain.

High Initial Costs: Developing immersive content and acquiring VR/AR hardware can be expensive, especially for smaller organisations. What is often overlooked is the time required for headset maintenance and software updates. This does need to be factored in carefully. Some organisations do deliver the simulations on a 2D desktop environment which offers similar learning outcomes but not as much learner satisfaction or engagement.

Technical Barriers: Users may face issues with motion sickness, hardware compatibility, or lack of digital literacy.

Content Standardisation: Creating universally effective scenarios that cater to diverse industries and cultures is complex.

Data Privacy and Ethics: Collecting and analysing behavioral data raises concerns about consent, bias, and data security.

As hardware becomes more affordable -we’re starting to see significant investment in lower-cost AR glasses from most major players - and as AI models become more sophisticated, the barriers to adoption are gradually diminishing. The future of soft skills training is one where AI curates personalised learning journeys and immersive technologies provide realistic practice environments, and where human mentors offer nuanced guidance and support. Those involved in training and development today are well advised to get up to speed on how immersive technologies can be integrated into their current programmes.