Why L&D Professionals Should Turn to Augmented Reality as Offices Work From Home

The key question facing L&D professionals globally is how to effectively train their workers remotely during a pandemic. Whilst circumstances may have changed, their goals remain the same. L&D professionals still need to make sure that their workers’ skills are kept up to date, and whilst workers can’t attend a physical classroom, there are still skills that need to be learned.

Such dramatic changes in the working landscape call for adaptation and the use of new tools to deliver innovative and powerful experiences to help workers improve their skills. Augmented reality is uniquely positioned to deliver such experiences. It has the potential to be deployed across mobile devices meaning that teams can develop new ways to train their employees, in a cost-effective and direct way.

Here are four ways augmented reality can help L&D professionals in the current climate:

1. Provable Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI is a key indicator of success for any project. Measuring the success rate of a learning and development project isn’t always an easy task, as it requires measuring how successful an initiative was at teaching people. This also becomes more challenging when people work remotely, as the impact gets harder to track.

AR provides an engaging and memorable way to deliver information, which leads to a longer-term impact and therefore more valuable training. The more memorable the teaching method, the fewer times it will need to be repeated, and therefore the less money will need to be spent. Not only this but augmented reality can also be very cost-effective to produce, in many cases only needing a printed code to open the door to 360 walkthroughs, games, and tests. The type of experiences created, e.g. games, lend themselves to tracking and testing which is a great way to track the progress and their value of the scheme remotely.

These benefits can be shown to management, indicating the success of a project. No matter where anyone is based, the success would be traced back to the L&D team to assess its ROI.

2. Deliver Real-Time Data

Many augmented reality content creation tools provide real-time data on how the AR experience is used and when giving L&D professionals insight into how workers are engaging with the materials. These capabilities become invaluable as professionals track how they are working at home.

L&D professionals can track stats, from the number of times people repeat a task, to how long they sit reading a specific page. As they happen in real-time, teams can get an instant insight into the success of their work, which in turn feeds into their learning plan.

3. Provide Actionable Analytics

This data can then be used to provide actionable analytics. If one team member completes one task, but not another. Why is that? The pain points can be identified within the process, then tackled immediately to improve it going forward.

As an example, if the data indicates workers are spending more time on one particular training material, seen via an increased dwell time, then this may mean more resources are needed on that particular topic, or that the materials that exist are not fulfilling the workers’ needs.

4. Predict Workforce Trends

Using the data collected and analyzed appropriately, augmented reality can also be used to predict workforce trends. Once identified, further AR experiences can be developed to meet these needs, providing other impactful experiences that drive their skills further.  Practitioners can access the information and use it to improve their work.

The current global situation is forcing companies to innovate on how they deliver learning solutions. In turn, L&D professionals have the opportunity to use new technologies to deliver their training in engaging ways.

With more people working remotely, augmented reality can be used to update old procedures, breathe new life into their existing programs, and ultimately deliver on their goals. Situations like this call for adaptation, and AR is the tool for the job.