3D Virtual World Environment for New Employee Assimilation

March 27, 2009Next Generation Sourcing

In this article, I want to talk about how to take advantage of virtual world learning environment as the new employee assimilation tool, the objective is to make it easier and faster to train a huge influx of new employees — allowing them to quickly understand IBM’s policies, culture, products and services, decision-making regimens and technical skills they need to be productive, as well as build out their social networks.

"New IBM employees separated by thousands of miles will be able to mingle, interact and share ideas in the virtual world before their first day on the job. They can learn real-life working skills such as signing up for benefits, developing code as part of a global team and ramping up sales skills before they meet with IBM clients.“ - Ted Hoff, IBM vice president of learning

Let’s have a look at what IBM did before on the virtual world in terms of new employee assimilation:

In India, IBM has begun using virtual worlds to help onboard thousands of new employees who work in geographically dispersed offices.
In China, IBM launched a global program called Fresh Blue for interns who plan to join IBM after they graduate college in 2007.
In China, IBM launched a program called Sales Quest to train hundreds of new salespeople on how to sell products and service in the real world in 2007.
In US, IBM use the virtual world for former IBM employees -both retirees and those still working to mentor new hires through speed mentoring.

In the beginning of this year, I was requested to take lead a project which called Your IBM Virtual World for China New Employee Assimilation. The scope of this project will cover all new employees in GCG and the content should integrate current Your IBM learning contents, activities and services into virtual world environment. The function should support persistent content hosting, well structured learning guidance and up-to-date learning events and pervasive mentoring/networking opportunities for new employees.

In my design, the key features of this virtual world should include:

“Meta-geography” - Participants can be widely distributed across geographic locales and time zones, yet share a common virtual location.
Avatar embodiment - Enables a sense of presence, gestural communication, body language, social cues
Software agents (bots) - Useful for orientation, guidance, explanations, demonstrations.
Teleportation - Instantaneous movement within the virtual world, useful for structuring presentation of learning material.
Collaborative and asynchronous communication - encourages collaborative learning.
Collaboration and Social Networking - Mutual interdependence. Employees need each other to find answers and solve issues

Here I put 3 charts for inspiring your ideas on how to do the similar projects if your organization will put efforts on developing virtual world for active learning or development. The first chart is about Project Activities, in which some key project components have been listed and you need to take special look and come out your own workstream. The second is a land demo chart on how your ideas could intially communicated to your development or coding team. The third chart is a snapshot for how the demo Welcome Center looks like once your production version is put online.

Chart One: Project Activities

Chart 2: Land Demo

Chart 3: Demon Welcome Center

If you are interested in this topic or you are the expert on this subject, pls contact me for more discussion. I am looking forward to learning more knowledge from you.

Tags: Virtual World new employee assimilation

China Recruitment Marketing