Now that you’ve gathered all this tacit knowledge, VR also helps you transfer that knowledge to other trainees within your organization. The uniqueness of VR as a platform shines here, particularly in four distinct ways:
1. VR immerses your trainees
For decades now, we’ve known that distractions interfere with your learning. The more distracting your environment is, the more likely your attention is to shift from your learning material to an irrelevant stimulus.
So, if you’re planning to train someone, you must make sure the environment they’re learning in is free of distractions.
VR knowledge transfer training is optimal in such situations. VR headsets dominate your visual field. You won’t notice other visual distractions—like your co-worker moving in front of you—and shift your attention away from your learning material.
Instead, you’ll remain present in your training environment. You’ll take in everything in your surroundings. Since your training experiences will be created specifically for learning purposes, there’ll be no distractions.
Let’s take a fire safety drill training in VR. In VR, you’ll experience the actual stakes of a fire emergency. You’ll see the warning lights flashing, the siren blaring, and the fire spreading. You’ll be immersed in the drill, and you’ll follow the precise steps the training module guides you through.
2. Interactivity
VR training modules are also interactive learning experiences. You don’t observe someone follow the steps; you actually do them yourself.
When using VR training for succession planning, you can turn the specific tacit knowledge that you have gathered from experts into interactive SOPs. Basically, you can turn even the smallest of nuances—like a subtle glance—into an interaction you have to complete inside the VR training module. Once you practice it a few times, it becomes tacit knowledge for you, too.
3. Repeatability
Practice separates experts from novices. If you’re a novice with the complete theoretical knowledge around a procedure, you still won’t be able to match the execution and precision of someone who lacks the theoretical foundation but has practiced the same a thousand times.
A specific benefit of VR knowledge transfer training is that it's repeatable. There’s no cap on how many times you can train. If you haven’t achieved the desired competency for a specific procedure, you can practice in VR until you are proficient.
For instance, consider learning defensive driving in a manufacturing plant. You might start with bad outcomes if you use VR for knowledge transfer during onboarding. However, the more you practice, the more the procedures become a habit. After a while, you don’t actively recall the specific steps and instead go through the motions of defensive driving through pure muscle memory.
If you pit VR training vs traditional training, this is one of the biggest benefits in the former’s favor.
4. Increased confidence
Practice also leads to confidence. Because once you’ve done a procedure a hundred times in VR and become good at it, you also see firsthand how good you are. Each time you complete the procedure without any mistakes, your mind files it away as evidence of how capable you are in dealing with that challenge.
Confidence is key in a lot of situations. If you second-guess yourself during a critical situation, instead of following what you have learned, the resulting outcomes can be disastrous. Implementing VR for knowledge transfer training prevents that.
