A few days ago I had a tutorial with my daughter's teacher, and that made me think about how she will face her future training processes. How will she learn? How often will she have to recycle herself? What technology will she use to be able to keep up with her future training demands?

And as I asked myself these questions, and without further ado, I realised that many of our customers in the industrial sector are facing exactly the same thing, today.

They face the immense challenge of keeping all their employees trained, while improving their performance and productivity and standardising this knowledge so that everyone performs with the quality and efficiency that the company needs and demands.

The question really is, how to deal with such a retrograde step and how to achieve an adequate training policy that helps to make a difference via the quality of the employees?

The answer, however, is in our hands from the moment we are born. Because the main way to learn is by experiencing scenarios and situations such as those provided by the game. It is an immensely fabulous training technique that makes us learn immediately and achieve greater expertise since we are able to walk, to relate, to talk, to differentiate shapes and colours and everything that makes our brain mature.

This technique, evolved of course, is the one we are applying at the Alava Group, together with our partner Innovae.

Using gamming techniques with extended reality technology (AR/VR/MR) has allowed our clients in different industrial sectors to increase the knowledge retention rate to 75% of the knowledge they want to absorb, far above the 10% that reading or 30% that a demonstration can provide, or even the 50% that a group discussion can provide.

This is pure gold for a company as it allows them to guarantee a better and higher quality of both theoretical and practical knowledge of their collaborators, which results in improved efficiency and productivity.

Learning what to do in your day-to-day work through virtual practice helps you a lot to be able to do your job well from the very first moment and to make a qualitative leap in productivity and performance in your job.

It is wonderful to know that today those expensive technologies (flight simulators) that taught pilots how to fly a plane before getting their hands on a real one can be applied at minimal cost to teach anyone how to operate a crane, or high precision equipment or machinery, to drive a forklift or to assemble high precision components, or to perform actions to control emergency or health risk situations. Learning by simulating what to do, learning by playing.

I said before at a very low cost, because all that is really needed is a platform with the possibility of incorporating Virtual or Augmented Reality so that everyone can programme their training according to the needs, levels and expertise of the students. Something that allows not only to monitor the progress of each person, but even to design training tailored to the person or their specific responsibilities.

Today our customers are achieving up to 50% reduction in training costs. We believe it is critical for more and more companies to incorporate training programmes that use extended reality technology with gamification as their main training tool.

Of course, after talking to my daughter's tutor and knowing how they study in schools and universities today, only gamified training systems with reality emulation will allow this and future generations to keep up with the pace of knowledge and skills that industries will demand in the future, ... or should I say today?

Antonio Ramirez
CMO - Alava Group