How VR Will Change Soft Skills Training

2017 was the year of the Silence Breakers. Will 2018 be the year immersive technologies help tackle harassment culture?

Soft skills are “people skills”. They also go by many other names such as 21st Century skills, and socio-emotional skills. Yet regardless of how they are labelled, these skills essentially involve understanding oneself and relating to others by showing empathy, embracing diversity and abandoning unconscious biases. They can be trained, but current approaches are ineffective.

An individual with strong soft skills can be an effective collaborator, leader, and good citizen. They not only know what behaviors are appropriate, and how to identify them, but also how to generate those behaviors, and do so in a highly effective manner.

While the “Silence Breakers” and #metoo movement make glaringly clear that effective soft skills training is seriously lacking in the workplace (and in society in general) a completely independent movement toward more artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace has led many in the C-suite to suggest that soft skills are going to become increasingly important.

This leads me to predict that next year will see a spike in commercial offerings in soft skills training, focusing more on the science of learning during product development. This trend has already…