Think back to your time in school — when did you learn the most?
Your answer will depend on several factors, from your learning style to available resources. Even if you benefitted most from hands-on experience, your colleague may have excelled more in one-on-one mentorship sessions. Meanwhile, another colleague may learn best with self-guided content.
Everyone’s ideal learning environment is different. This requires instructors to employ various educational techniques, technologies, and resources to meet each student’s unique needs and preferences.
When we apply this to workplace learning, the story is the same. Employees need a highly supportive and dynamic learning environment to do their best work and achieve maximum professional growth.
Establishing a dynamic approach to learning comes down to one crucial factor — leveraging immersive learning technologies to enhance learning and development (L&D) programs.
What is immersive learning?
Immersive learning is a broad term referring to a training methodology that values experience above all.
Highly reliant on modern learning technologies, immersive learning strategies strive to provide all participants with a personalized program that offers hands-on experience and knowledge. This experience is supported by digital capabilities that make it easy to access learning content, such as a learning platform that can act as a single source of truth for all organizational information.
The benefits of immersive learning technologies include:
- Improved Knowledge-Sharing: Immersive learning is all about connecting the dots between different subjects and the real-life applications or experts behind them. By embracing immersive learning technologies, an organization can improve its approach to knowledge sharing and ensure all team members have equal access to professional improvement opportunities.
- High-Performing Leaders: L&D leaders have a crucial role in the learning opportunities your organization provides. Rather than giving your L&D leaders a one-dimensional objective, immersive learning technologies help to give your L&D team the resources and support needed to build dynamic learning programs.
- Enhanced Learning Programs: For the actual learning programs being created, immersive learning technologies improve these programs to provide participants with a more well-rounded experience and education. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, immersive learning technologies enable your programs to mix live workshops with self-paced content. Additionally, end-to-end learning platforms help to connect students more closely with mentors and instructors.
The 3 pillars of an immersive learning experience
As your L&D team works to establish a more dynamic learning environment, it is essential to know how and when to employ immersive learning technologies.
Here are the three pillars of building an immersive learning experience for your teams:
Personalization
Immersive learning technologies help to tailor learning programs to an individual’s needs and skill levels.
Enabling personalization within your learning environments requires you to consider how each employee’s needs differ and what solutions can meet those needs. When building a learning program, these insights must be used to determine the different types of learning sessions and content to offer.
For example, you will almost always have a split between employees regarding those who like in-person learning versus remote, self-guided learning.
As a result, you need to account for this difference in preference by offering both instructor-led and self-guided options. Additionally, your L&D programs should provide flexible scheduling so employees can engage with your learning content when it is most convenient. This often necessitates offering live and pre-recorded lessons to accommodate each employee’s scheduling needs.
Real-time performance measurement
Immersive learning technologies generate a wealth of data and analytics that L&D professionals can use to refine and optimize their programs. By tracking your learners’ overall performance, behaviors, and engagement, you can gain insights that help improve programs in real-time.
With the right mix of immersive learning technologies, you can monitor key metrics like:
- Program Effectiveness: Your learning programs are only as successful as they are effective. If your employees walk away without any actionable takeaways or new knowledge, that can indicate a serious problem that needs to be fixed. Immersive learning technologies can help you track several important key performance indicators (KPIs) like skill competency, participation, engagement, and program completion to help inform you of each program’s effectiveness.
- Employee Preferences: Knowing what types of learning content and resources your employees prefer is crucial to making the most of your learning technology investments. For instance, if you spend heaps of time and money on in-person learning sessions only to discover that most of your employees prefer self-guided content, you need the data tracking capabilities to inform you of this disparity within your current program.
- Return-on-Investment (ROI): When determining your ROI for your learning programs, you need easily accessible data ready to use and analyze. Immersive learning technologies can help bolster your internal information and data analytics, ensuring you have clear insights to work with throughout the L&D process. Plus, leveraging immersive learning technologies to enhance the learner’s experience can increase ROI by boosting team participation and productivity.
Workplace learning culture
Learning does not begin and end in an L&D program. It extends into all facets of day-to-day business.
As such, your employees should be learning continuously when completing the responsibilities of their respective roles — not just when participating in a structured learning session.
Immersive learning is all about encompassing the employee experience within a learning-friendly ecosystem. Employees should be made to feel safe when expressing new ideas or perspectives, encouraging them to seek out answers and follow their innovative instincts.
When immersive learning technologies are used to establish a comprehensive L&D strategy, they can help to create a sense of safety and confidence in your employees. By building an open and collaborative culture focused on continuous improvement, you can enable your team to reach their full potential.
Enable immersive learning with PlusPlus
As we embark on the journey into 2024, we must recognize the immense potential of immersive learning technologies within the L&D space.
Immersive learning stands as a beacon of innovation and effectiveness in learning and development. Its ability to engage learners, create realistic and safe training environments, provide personalized experiences, generate data-driven insights, and ensure access to highly adaptable learning content make it an indispensable tool for L&D leaders.
At PlusPlus, our comprehensive learning platform can deliver all of this and more.
With knowledge sharing, automated scheduling, personalized programming, mentorship, and self-paced learning capabilities, PlusPlus has all the immersive learning technologies your L&D team could need.
PlusPlus is designed to simplify internal connections, making it easier to discover and collaborate with your top experts, leaders, and mentors.
Discover the power of immersive learning today by booking a PlusPlus demo.
