Study: VR training boosts students' application skills

Whether starting a career, doing an internship or changing jobs - job interviews are one of the key situations in professional life. Those who are convincing here open up opportunities for their own career. At the same time, job interviews are considered one of the most stressful social interactions. Many people find it difficult to appear confident, sell themselves effectively and deal with their own nervousness. Despite the importance of job interviews, effective training opportunities in a realistic yet safe environment are rare.

“Our aim was to train key social skills from professional life in a realistic but psychologically safe environment,” explains Prof. Dr David Loschelder from the Institute of Management & Organisation, “with VR we can simulate situations very realistically that can hardly be practised safely in real life - and thus specifically build up self-confidence and reduce anxiety.”

The research team led by Prof Poldi Kuhl and Prof David Loschelder at Leuphana University Lüneburg has now shown that virtual reality (VR) can be a highly effective method: Students who practised a job interview in an immersive VR scenario achieved comparable learning success to participants in text-based chat training. Both formats increased task-related self-efficacy in the long term and reduced anxiety about upcoming real job interviews. The VR training only took half as long as text-based chat training. In addition, the positive effects lasted up to four months after completing the training: Participants from the VR condition later recalled the VR experience even more frequently, were more likely to recommend it to others and reported a higher willingness to pay for further training.

“The fact that the training programmes had positive effects shows the graduates' need to be trained in job interviews," explains first author Yannik Escher, "the VR training was perceived as even more positive, helpful and realistic and was better remembered by the participants.”

The researchers at Leuphana explain the success of the VR format with a newly developed model for acquiring social skills in immersive learning environments. The results show that VR-supported application training is not only effective, but also particularly efficient and resource-saving. The VR training materials developed are available as open source to all universities in German-speaking countries - for use in career services, for example. Corresponding training and further education programmes have already taken place with other interested universities.

The project was developed as part of the DigiTaL project funded by the Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education.