A new generation of “PlayStation professionals” is entering the workforce, a phenomenon with implications for businesses everywhere – perhaps including yours.
Professional football players already rehearse their moves with video games. Pilots earn hours in flight simulators. The America’s Army game is being widely used for recruiting and training purposes.
Up next: look forward to high-tech simulations taking on more challenging topics like cyber defense and “soft” skills such as business leadership and executive selling.
Gronstedt Group’s new white paper for the eLearning Guild takes an in-depth look at the many fascinating ways game-based simulations are making inroads into the corporate world. You can download Simulation-Based Learning: The Rise of the PlayStation Professionals at their site for a deeper dive into how some of our clients prepare their employees for the actual work they’ll encounter on the job. Using immersive, “hands-on” technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the new generation of training simulations is the next-best thing to being there – and maybe better, since there’s no risk of breaking anything. These games challenge players to level up through increasingly complex real-world tasks and offer feedback and recognition along the way.
For us, the single most exciting development is the way learning simulations are now migrating away from the glowing rectangular screen and into embodied learning applications that activate muscle memory. VR and AR are ushering in a new era of experiential, visceral learning that promises to upend training and professional performance as we know it. In short, we’re a lot closer to the future than we are the past, a dynamic Anders Gronstedt explores in the video trailer for the Realities360 conference (click “VIEW TRAILER”).
In other news, Dr. Gronstedt spoke with CLO Magazine for its feature story on virtual reality learning (and the sidebars on augmented reality and VR as “The Ultimate Empathy machine.”).
Professor Tony O’Driscoll of DukeCE, David Metcalf, University of Central Florida, and Gronstedt held a keynote session at the Online Learning Conference in New Orleans about the future of learning in 2020. Read Tony’s Training Magazine article about how they co-created a transformative vision for learning with 500 Learning and Development professionals.
We’re also excited to be keynoting the TMN Master Series Webinar. Go to this page to sign up now.
We have a busy conference speaking schedule this spring, so there will be ample opportunities for us to get together and chat:
next week we’ll speak at a CLO conference in the Bay Area
in May we’ll speak at ATD International in San Diego and Immersive Technology in L&D in Orlando
join us in June at the Life Sciences Trainers & Educators Network Conference in Phoenix and Realities360 in San Jose
and in July we’ll be at Serious Play in Washington, DC.
As always, let us know if we can set a time to discuss how Gronstedt Group can help address your organization’s learning challenges.