Magical Realism Doesn’t Work in a Fire Alarm Environment

• You have a mountain of new hires to onboard and the war for talent is raging.
• You must immediately scale your product manufacturing strategies across global teams.
• The drum beat to gain market share is deafening.
• The war for talent is on!
• Technology and regulatory requirements seem to evolve daily, and you can’t keep up.
• The opportunity cost of not being first to market is profound!
• All of those new onboards need to be trained — er, um “upskilled.”
• The reliable staff you have is now looking at greener pastures because you’ve completely neglected to incentivize them with the cutting-edge learning and upskilling platforms.

In this high-stakes, turn-on-a-dime environment, why are you deluding yourself into an alternate reality where you, the super hero/yes person can handle everything just described while simultaneously building a fully immersive learning and upskilling experience with internal resources?

“Can’t we just insource this? How hard could it be?” Intellectual humility — It’s a thing.

You. Cannot. Do. It. You will overspend. You will endure uncontrolled scope creep. It will turn into a quagmire. Fortunately, this entire scenario can be avoided with Virtuosi VR; a fully immersive, scalable, turnkey solution for your globally distributed advanced manufacturing teams.

That’s a Revolutionary Idea!
Let Us Never Speak of It Again!

Alrighty then, Captain America — you can hear the myriad reasons for why constructing a fully immersive advanced manufacturing learning and upskilling platform from scratch (internally) will assuredly lead to disaster; yet, you aren’t synthesizing it (there will be a vocabulary quiz at the end of the article to measure your understanding of adult learning theory). But the siren song of the hero’s journey — full of peril (and plenty of teachable moments) is too compelling. You tell yourself, “We’re a roll-up-our-sleeves kind of org! We can do this!” and continue “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”

Before you decide that creating a paradigm-shifting immersive learning and upskilling platform in house is the hill you’re going to die on, we have a few questions for you.

1. How are you going to effectively make learning “sticky”?
2. How will you measure said stickiness?
3. How are you going to effectively scale your learning platforms to a multi-lingual staff?
4. Do you already know how to integrate with an LMS that’s a correct fit for your organizational strategies and goals?
5. How will you push and scale updates to match real-time industry shifts in best practices?
6. How long will it take to line up and vet SMEs, content, assessment, and curriculum architects?
7. How will you effectively assess the program and learner skills retention and application?
8. How will you restrain scope creep when the inevitable “bright ideas” flow in from every armchair quarterback in every vertical?
9. What does the pacing guide look like year after year? What even is a pacing guide?
10. Does anyone in your organization even know how to build a VR platform?

The pooled analysis of primary outcomes showed that VR improves test scores moderately compared with other approaches (standardized mean difference [SMD] = 0.53; 95% Confidence Interval [CI] 0.09–0.97, p < 0.05; I2 = 87.8%). The high homogeneity indicated that the studies were different from each other. Therefore, we carried out meta-regression as well as subgroup analyses using seven variables (year, country, learners, course, intervention, comparator, and duration). We found that VR improves post-intervention test scores of anatomy compared with other types of teaching methods.”

“The effectiveness of virtual reality-based technology on anatomy teaching: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled studies.” — by Jingjie Zhao, Xinliang Xu, Hualin Jiang, and Yi Ding

OK, that was more than a FEW questions. However, there are hundreds of elements to consider when you’re attempting to design a robust, multilingual platform for skills uplift in the ATMP and high-risk pharmaceuticals manufacturing space. We didn’t want to completely freak you out.

The Customization Fallacy and You

Alright, alright, we’ve indulged our blithe, yet withering, disapproval. Now it’s time for clarity. Let’s begin by dissecting the commonly held, but totally inaccurate, belief that not only is creating the architecture for an immersive learning environment not that difficult, there’s also no one out there who can possibly understand the intricacies and intimacies of your unicorn of a company. FALSE. Virtuosi VR is the singular source in the pharma, biotech, and ATMP high-risk manufacturing ecosystems for preparing your globally dispersed teams by:

• Minimizing risk to your people, equipment, and manufacturing
• Reducing time to market
• Scaling quickly — regardless of language
• Scaling operations quickly

Choosing to partner with a company whose bench is populated by VR, adult learning, pharma, biotech, and ATMP subject-matter experts means that your return on investment is realized almost immediately via:

• High-impact cost reductions across operations functions
• Increased functional speed by your people on the lines
• Soaring improvement in product quality
• Error rates that sink like a stone

How can any org make the kind of promises outlined above? It’s profoundly simple. We’ve walked in your shoes. We know what you need because we know what we’re doing and how you do what you do.

Our teams aren’t distracted by extraneous contracts to create games or entertainment experiences. Our core competency is exclusive to learning and manufacturing improvement in the pharma and biotech industries.

Your mission to implement a pliable turnkey platform that can keep up with industry shifts in best practice allows no room for interpretation and guesswork. Partner with an immersive gaming outfit that decided to hang out a shingle as an L&D center of excellence and the struggles to build the airplane while it’s flying or will crash the best laid strategy to scale staff skills quality.

Constructing a learning experience that yields operators who are also critical thinkers requires platform engineers with the knowledge of the foundational and cutting edge in both andragogy (adult learning design) and pharma/biotech. That particular alchemy is not realized in a gaming studio or even in a corporate L&D setting. Virtuosi’s team is the world’s only source for meeting your unique needs for a future-focused workforce, rooted in a rock-solid understanding of foundational concepts. We go light years beyond theoretical understanding into the real-life, practical complexities of applications. That’s where your success is realized.

It is a new way of learning that enhances your understanding of the real lab environment in a virtual way. Virtuosi includes comprehensive content, a good link to the patient, and context on what makes learning more effective.

- Quality Head, Top 100 Pharma Company and Virtuosi Client

Train the Trainer Isn’t a No Brainer

At this point, you may be willing to embrace the fact that phrases like “Build a future-ready workforce.” - “You need teams that think critically and understand their ‘Why?” - “Create lifelong learners.” go way beyond tired platitudes.

It’s dawning on you that the future is here. Advanced manufacturing ecosystems that engage VR, immersives, and cloud-based asynchronous learning modules — engagements that heretofore seemed like science fiction and fads — are going to eat your lunch if you don’t get ahead of the shifts.

Well, my newly elucidated friend; you can now illuminate the lengthy list of counterpoints explaining why antiquated models like train the trainer won’t yield the learning stickiness, skills synthesis, or impart the ability to cross-apply deep learning” like immersive, scalable-ready, on-demand platforms!

Cue the confetti cannons for you and the team!

Conference-based learning and all of its inherent downsides like cost, travel, and loss of time on task only exacerbates the bottlenecks created by information loss and retention issues from a static teach-and-do engagement. Attendees may return to deliver the same-old PPTs and a few files to read created by only moderately reliable sources. How does this model create a long-term foundational and standardized skills uplift strategy? It doesn’t AND you have to keep purchasing every time you need to refresh or bring new people in.

In simpler terms: Do you write company communications with quill and parchment? Do you deliver that message by carrier pigeon? If you still rely on outdated conferences, SOPs, and the good mood and rare scheduling availability of your internal SMEs to “train” your teams, you may as well keep filling that inkwell and feeding those birds!

Stop defaulting to “This is how we’ve always done it!” A paradigm shift is in easy reach.

• Your teams must be adaptable and agile.
• Your organization must evolve at speed and as the life sciences industry embraces emerging technologies.
• YOUR LEARNING PLATFORM must be comprehensive, scalable, turnkey, and immersive to trump internal resourcing, scope creep, and cost overruns every single time.

Cut the hassle and go straight to success.

Don’t be fooled by imitators without industry expertise in the science behind the compliance.

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