Public speaking is widely recognized as an important leadership skill. Studies and surveys indicate that such communication skills are the foundation of successful careers, even more impactful than intelligence and aptitude.
As a key marker of communication capabilities, they play heavily into selection for promotion. Given the impact on chance of future success and leadership ability, it is astounding how neglected public speaking is in leadership development. A central reason is the craft of public speaking is difficult to train effectively.Â
Experience is key to effective training, but traditionally is difficult, costly, and requires lots of effort. The most common approach in Leadership Development is training session, usually from ½ day to 2 days. This can be effective in raising awareness of concepts, tips, best practices, and tricks; The knowledge gained doesn’t translate effectively into skills, since skill development requires practice and that is at best limited in usual formats. This format also ineffective for dealing with the fear of public speaking, which requires repeated practice in a socially secure setting.
Effective Training through Virtual Experiences
The great challenge of both training public speaking skills and getting over fear is getting safe, targeted experience speaking in front of people. Virtual Reality (VR) is an ideal technology for creating experiences. Research has shown VR public speaking experiences are comparable to the real-world. At the same time, the virtual aspect of the experience negates the social impacts associated with poor performance that we all fear. This means willingness to start and continue practice increases.
VR technologies makes the experience real and provides psychological safety. Effective training requires a solution that goes beyond; the solution needs to provide the right experiences, targeted to the needs of each individual.
Virtual Orator is a VR public speaking training solution designed specifically for creating those targeted experiences for professional and corporate use.
The experience in Virtual Orator can be configured to a wide range of situations: different rooms, audience sizes and behavior profiles, or add challenges. You can import your own slides to the virtual scenario. Virtual Orator provides objective feedback on performance metrics.
As trainer you can even add your own audience speech to activate during a session.
Virtual Orator can be used effectively for overcoming fear, building specific skills, honing important presentations and pitches, and even for evaluating potential employees.
