Can You Do Soft Skill Training with Simulations?

Soft skills are essential now more than ever, but we’ve found a problem.

A majority of employers say soft skills are a crucial factor in the hiring process, but hiring managers report that it’s challenging to find candidates with valuable soft skills. This disconnect can be boiled down to three myths:

1. Soft skills are complex to teach.
2. Soft skills are challenging to learn.
3. It’s virtually impossible to measure progress in soft skill development accurately. 

The good news is that we’ve found a solution to address all three of those misconceptions. 

Simulations offer situational training with real-world experiences and give your employees instant, actionable feedback. Your employees can benefit from soft skills training and translate their learning into positive client interactions. Let’s explore how simulations can make a significant difference in your soft skills training and real-life examples of how companies use simulations to train and develop soft skills.

Using Simulations for Soft Skill Training

Traditional soft skills training is often years behind the innovation required in today’s business climate. Fixing that issue starts with developing a clear line of communication with your employees about what is crucial to know on the job and how to handle certain situations.

Providing interactive solutions for your soft skills training helps bridge that gap. A day-in-the-life simulation based on real-life experiences of someone in a particular role helps deliver the best learning experience for your employees. 

Simulations engage your employees better and prepare them for real-world scenarios with significantly less in-person training and fewer costs. At Capsim, we have your interactive solution for soft skills training called CapsimInbox. This software allows you to provide an immersive experience tailored to your company and employee needs.

Situational Training

Dr. Sam Shriver famously said, “Situational leadership helps leaders learn how to think before it teaches them what to do.” We couldn’t agree more.

Situational training prepares your employees for scenarios they have yet to encounter. The alternative is going through trial and error processes of making mistakes and learning on the job. Why not have them learn in a risk-free environment like a simulation?

Simulations are a helpful way to virtually transport your employee into a real-life scenario without needing to invest in fancy equipment or unengaging in-person training.

Inbox simulations are a familiar and immersive way to prompt your employees for multiple-choice or open-response answers to real-world situations. Multiple choice answers are valuable for delivering instant feedback on why one answer is preferred over another. In contrast, open-response questions can allow you to see your employee’s critical thinking and reasoning skills.

Safe Learning Environment

Sending out employees to meet with clients or lead projects without the necessary soft skills is gambling with your company’s future. Instead of finding out the hard way by receiving negative feedback from a client or coworker, your employees can learn in mock situations. Simulations offer a safe learning environment that helps mitigate risk for your company.

Efficient Soft Skill Training

Onboarding and ongoing training can be a time-intensive task. Training on hard or technical skills can often take weeks to complete on top of soft skill assessments and training. Traditional soft skill training methods rely on in-person sessions that steal hours of time from multiple people.

CapsimInbox simulations are efficient, time-saving tools that are easy to manage. A common way companies use CapsimInbox is for microlearning. Microlearning is a granular way to learn in short training sessions so your employees can maximize their time.

High-Quality Feedback

When developing soft skills in a professional environment, it can be difficult to measure and share progress. Besides managerial reports or meeting outcomes, it’s challenging for employees to figure out how they’re performing in a timely manner. 

That’s where simulations come in handy. CapsimInbox soft skill training provides employees with instant, actionable feedback that is 100 percent non-biased. There’s no worry of skewed results depending on the reviewer, so you know there is a level playing field with your employees’ assessments. With embedded assessments, you’re also able to objectively measure skills as decisions are made.

Providing actionable insights improves employee development and decision making, along with opening the lines of communication within your organization.

Authentic Experience

At some point in our lives, we've all said, “When am I ever going to use this information in the real world?” Unlike the formula for calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle, soft skills are extremely valuable in the real world. Soft skill training is especially valuable when paired with real-world scenarios. 

Applying knowledge in a virtual, seemingly real-life scenario is just one step closer to nailing it in person. You don’t need VR goggles to make it happen, and you don’t have to wait for an organic experience to occur to see how well someone handles--or fails-- in a situation. You can provide authentic experiences with real-world context, so when your employees encounter these situations, they can easily apply their soft skill training.

Skill Gap Analysis

Assessing your employees’ skill gaps requires putting them in scenarios likely to occur organically. They also need a solid foundation to think through unique challenges when they arise. That’s why many companies are trying to find online self-assessments to measure the skills of their employees.

With CapsimInbox, self-assessment and development plans are taken to the next level. Your employees can see instant feedback on each answer and see where they need to improve overall. You can also compare employees’ self-assessments to their actual simulation performance to determine how well an employee assesses their skills.

Custom or Pre-Built Soft Skill Training Simulations

Pre-built simulations are a helpful tool to get your simulation soft skill training set up quickly. Unlike other tech-based training methods like E-learning platforms and virtual reality, off-the-shelf simulations on specific topics help you get started faster.

But what if you have a niche or specific need requiring a more custom approach? You could build another Powerpoint or ask your technology vendor to create another VR/AR experience. But that requires hours of time or a lofty investment. 

Instead, you can use the CapsimInbox Authoring Platform to completely customize your soft skills training. From creating characters and roles to selecting the skills you want to measure and writing the messages yourself, you have full control to ensure you design a simulation aligned with your desired outcomes.

Soft Skill Training for Your Company

Simulations are the future of soft skill training and the most efficient way to improve your internal and client-facing processes. Streamlining your learning processes helps relieve the time burden on hiring managers and L&D staff while helping employees see progress over time.

To see a live example of what an inbox simulation looks like, check out our CapsimInbox Instant Preview.