Immersive virtual reality for soft-skills training of front-desk agents: Collective creation and appropriation of a virtual learning environment

Immersive virtual reality has gained a renewed popularity in the last decade, following the commercialization of HMDs and the surge in computing power. Allowing the creation of customized virtual worlds and both cognitive and emotional investment in these worlds for its users, immersive virtual reality has been used in education in training across several areas, mostly in the industrial sector and for procedural and technical knowledge. Research on training soft skills with this technology remains scarcer, and often does not question the adaptation of training processes by organizational members to integrate this technology. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap by presenting an intervention research with several partners aiming to create and test a customized learning environment for front-desk agents' training in a French public service organization. We underline how such a collaboration helps creating a customized virtual environment in which professional front-desk agents feel natural, and a virtual training scenario that adequately simulates real-life work situations, allowing professionals to appropriate the technology for their training. Then, we highlight how this technology enables professionals with different positions in the organization to share a same work experience, enabling them to collectively discuss the co-evolution of the technology and their training process.