Apple Vision Pro is cool, but people today need relevant experiential learning
Media initially defined the Apple Vision Pro headset as a niche accessory with little application outside of gaming. But Vision Pro could be hugely applicable in other areas, such as enabling remote work and facilitating in-depth training for real-world applications. And Microsoft’s decision to ensure customers have great Microsoft 365 experiences on Vision Pro indicates that Microsoft, more about business than leisure, thinks Apple really has something here.
When things like Vision Pro and, before that, gen AI come out, there’s a crazy amount of press coverage and people suddenly get excited about making progress. Yet most companies don’t know how to leverage these emerging technologies.
Dreaming about what it will be like in two to five years as cool things like AR and VR unfold is exciting. I’m a fan of Minority Report just like everyone else. The scenes where Tom Cruise uses all that futuristic technology are incredible. But you don’t have to wait for Minority Report level technology. Let’s leave that to Hollywood. Today you need to encourage innovation and successful employees.
Chief Product & Technology Officer for Skillable.
Discover what’s next, but also identify what you can do now
It’s fun to imagine how learning could evolve with a new product like the Vision Pro. But if you work at a traditional organization, you might be wondering: Will these things happen in my lifetime? What you may not know is that many companies today already provide experiential training.
You can create an environment that is completely tailored to a real-world scenario in your company and to your target audiences – whether they are sales engineers, field engineers, customer support people or anyone else working on a keyboard – and say, “figure that out. .” And you can give your people the opportunity to do that work as often as necessary, offering encouragement where they’ve done an excellent job and feedback where they need more practice.
This will save you a lot of money and increase the productive activity of your people – whether they are highly technical people, productivity workers or something in between – from now on.
Stop confusing planning with progress
Many companies spend a fortune developing the perfect skills taxonomies. Identifying the skills you have and need is extremely valuable, and we support that.
But there is a big difference between planning and progress. Don’t spend another quarter thinking about what could be the perfect approach that everyone needs.
This quarter, get started with training that can have a positive impact on your company. Put your head down and take two steps forward so that the third and fourth steps really become visible. Many companies don’t do that as well as they could, and they miss significant opportunities.
Get started: choose a role and a project
Start by choosing one or two roles and key projects. List the skills these roles need to successfully contribute to your business. There are probably four to eight things people need to know.
Make the business case to your supervisor and the learning and development department that you need a platform to build environments that can get these specific scenarios into the hands of your people now – before your business is under attack – to ensure that people really have the necessary skills.
Then build labs based on your scenarios and skill needs, and let people take those labs.
Measure success by performance, not minutes or usage
Make sure you have the data you need to understand what people really know and what they didn’t know so you can use it in your department or overall skills story. The skills-based organization that many are working towards requires accuracy.
You may know that someone has spent two hours on courses on a certain subject, but all it tells you is that he or she completed them. But is completing the course as adults really something to celebrate?
Now imagine if you knew that someone had four specific problems (that affected their success in their role) and solved them. It took them four tries to solve the third problem, but they did it. Who do you trust more: the person who completed the two-hour course or the person who solved the realistic labs?
Providing people with experiential opportunities that enable performance-based learning and validate an individual’s skills with high-fidelity evidence is clearly the best approach. That is why throughout history people learned through apprenticeship. Whether your name was Miller, Cooper or Black, you did what your family did and acquired skills through experiential learning.
But it was about more than just learning a skill, it was about contributing to your community. Unfortunately, the community aspect of skills has been lost since the Industrial Revolution.
Much of today’s business education focuses on getting people to use a new software feature, whether that feature actually solves a problem or not, because someone has invested in that feature. As a result, people spend time completing courses on things they will never use.
Avoid wasting time on such unnecessary exercises. Empower your content teams to create learning experiences that prepare your people to better contribute to their community: your business.
Build environments that lead to aha moments
Old-fashioned laboratories don’t allow adults to learn the skills they need. But providing your content teams with experiential learning opportunities can help your people experience aha moments.
As humans, we want and need to grapple with problems to solve them. We are going to learn just as much when we do things wrong as when we finally do things right. The important thing is that people have the opportunities to do that, and that’s what experiential learning is all about.
To be as competent and confident as possible, people need experiences that are relevant to the jobs at hand. Every department must give this a chance. And they don’t have to wait months or years for Apple Vision Pro to make that possible.
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This article was produced as part of Ny BreakingPro’s Expert Insights channel, where we profile the best and brightest minds in today’s technology industry. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Ny BreakingPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing, you can read more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro