Training Soft Skills with VR

Proceedings of The 4th World Conference on Education and Teaching

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Training Soft Skills with VR

Bjørn Salskov, Charlotte Falko

ABSTRACT: 

The banking sector within the EU is forced to use a significant amount of money on training their employees so they are sure that the live up to current legislation. The Banking sector in Denmark also wants their employees to be aware of the company’s way of doing business and make sure that the employees can sell the products at hand. To teach employees this they spend a lot of resources on training. This training is currently done as peer to peer or online tests. In our research wanted to see if we could teach bank employees presentation techniques using a VR headset. This was generally done to see if bank employees would want to learn with a VR headset and how their experiences would be after training with a VR headset.

The research project builds upon the notion of a formative intervention. This methodology is being used because we in this research project want to uncover the possibilities of a change in training methodology within the banking sector. Therefore, we began the project with a teaching session of the employees which the cooperating bank fund suitable for the project. This course in presentation technique is mandatory for the employees independent of the research project. The research team was not able to select candidates but were given 20 candidates all with a master’s degree background from varying research areas. This means that our findings are mostly suitable for bank employees with master’s degrees. The employees from the cooperating bank got a day course in presentation techniques the course focused on three main areas of a presentation, eye contact with audience, use of voice (pauses, fluctuation in speed and volume and noise) and use of gestures. At the end of the course, they had to prepare a presentation and these presentations were filmed by the research team. Then the participants given a set of VR glasses which they would bring with them home and their employer told them that they were expected to practice 2 hours with the VR headset. After 2-3 weeks the research team meet up with all the participants at their workplace where an interview was conducted, and the participants presented the presentation they had practice using VR and this presentation was again filmed by the research team.

keywords: Virtual Reality, training, Soft skills