When Facebook rebrands to ‘Meta’ and the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, says: “The metaverse is here, and it’s not only transforming how we see the world but how we participate in it – from the factory floor to the meeting room”, you know it’s time to listen.

And whether or not you’re still getting to grips with social media, or considering how to secure your brand’s best digital real estate in Decentraland, the fact is that the metaverse has arrived. What’s more, a multitude of brands, businesses, groups, and governments are creating homes there.

Businesses are waking up to the fact that the metaverse offers innumerable benefits, which include better customer service, new markets, products, and channels, and better ways of training employees and engaging with stakeholders.

Here are some key things to know about the metaverse:

• The metaverse is potentially endless and without borders: This immersive, digital world also offers multiple points of access, including VR headsets, haptic suits, avatars, AI bots… and a secure, fast digital connection.
• Bloomberg has estimated that the metaverse will be worth $800 billion by 2024: This offers businesses vast potential revenues in the form of metaverse services, advertising, crypto, NFT sales, and more.
• Plots of digital real estate in the metaverse are already selling for millions of pounds, particularly on Fashion Street in Decentraland: Here, big brands have already gained a foothold and banks are already offering cryptocurrency, payment services, and NFT secure storage.

What businesses need to know

The metaverse is undoubtedly the future as far as digital business is concerned. After all, look at some of the main benefits that businesses can enjoy:

• The chance to vastly reduce costs whilst offering enhanced, immediate, and highly immersive tailored customer experiences.
• A reduction in travel, helping to protect the environment by reducing carbon emissions.
• Brand building without geographic or physical locations, scaling up to serve customers in any area or location at speed.
• The chance to offer new services and products, such as NFT designs, crypto, online entertainment, branded virtual hangouts, and more.
• An engaging, immediate, scalable, replicable, and measurable way of training employees – and enjoying better results.

Whatever your thoughts on the metaverse, it’s here to stay. This will especially be the case as enabling technologies – such as headsets, AI, and wearables – evolve. So for businesses, the question then becomes, how quickly can you create your metaverse strategy and enjoy early adoption advantages?

There is no doubt that brands that can build their position in the metaverse quickly will gain experience, knowledge, reputation, customers, critical mass, and early-advantage insights and consolidation. These businesses will enjoy early gains, and prime digital real estate, before their competitors.

Building metaverse skills in your business

This drive to rapidly adapt to a transformative, entirely new paradigm world of immersive digital life brings about significant challenges. For businesses, access to the metaverse relies on developing and hiring the right skill sets.

Many leadership teams will find that their internal knowledge of the digital universe is varied. Some leaders may be getting to grips with social media whilst others have only heard of the metaverse in its current leisure and entertainment direction.

But with every challenge comes a superb opportunity. Not only does the metaverse offer businesses the chance to build their brand and business online, but it also provides a chance to deliver a wide range of training and learning opportunities in a richer, more engaging, more connected, and more cost-effective way than ever before.

Using the metaverse to train your business

To ensure your business can be at the forefront of the metaverse, it’s vital to upskill your staff at all levels of your organization. Here are some key focus areas and considerations:

Soft skills

Today’s executives need to have communication, interpersonal, teamworking, management, and problem-solving skills to succeed in a complex and ever-changing world. The metaverse can offer highly immersive and effective learning experiences delivered through VR technologies.

By putting the physical environment to one side, learners can embrace new ways of doing things and fresh ideas, pushing through boundaries and reaching new ground.

Technical learning

The same metaverse learning environment can be deployed to deliver technical and functional training to complex or highly-skilled industries. These include construction, energy, and manufacturing. As a hugely expansive learning platform without borders, the metaverse can offer learner-centered experiences with truly immersive functions.

This training doesn’t require any physical space and can use mass collaboration to allow learners and employees at all levels to develop, train and upskill.

Sales training

Similarly, the metaverse can replace traditional classrooms for sales training by allowing sales personnel to engage with experienced internal sales professionals for rapid learning. Techniques such as branching scenarios and storytelling combine with immersive scenarios, visuals, experiential learning and more to create enhanced results.

It’s worth noting that the metaverse can be designed to deliver any kind of training environment too, whether that’s a practical task scenario, a classroom, seating space, podium or theatre. Trainers can appear as fictional or real avatars depending on preference!

Onboarding

Gartner Group predicts that a quarter of workers will be on the metaverse for an hour or more each day in just three years. The research company has also found that experiential learning enhances retention and learning outcomes by 75%.

The metaverse certainly lends itself well to induction or onboarding training. Rather than reading long and arduous policies and product descriptions, new hires can experience the organization’s culture, values, and ethics, with faster learning deployment, lasting impressions, and the chance to engage with all kinds of other employees without physical travel.

Health and safety training

Another vital area where the metaverse can offer huge gains is health and safety training. The immersive, border-free learning environment allows users to experience relevant simulations that are designed around their roles and working environments, trying out solutions and gaining immediate feedback.

Learners can experience the risks and dangers present in any workplace whilst being completely safe in the online world.

The benefits of metaverse training

Whatever the type of training your business is considering, the metaverse potentially offers a digital learning solution that is:

• Wholly immersive and engaging to learners and users
• Cost-effective for delivery and perfectly replicable for further learning and training sessions – ideal for quality control
• Free from geographical constraints
• Low-carbon and kind to the environment, by taking travel out of the equation
• Primed to deliver measurable, better learning outcomes than traditional learning methods.
• Faster! PwC found that employees training with VR methods learned four times faster than classroom-based learners, and nearly twice as fast as e-learners. Additionally, VR learners felt 275% more confident to implement their new learning.
• Packed with learner benefits, such as learner-centered learning solutions, interaction with colleagues, trainers, and mentors in real time, enhanced decision-making, and support for hybrid workspaces. Learners can also use the metaverse to test and trial new ideas, innovations, and ways of working in a safe, secure online space.

How to train your business to be ready for the metaverse

The other angle to preparing for the metaverse, of course, is to ensure your internal workforce is trained to understand the metaverse and prepare to build your business and brand in this digital space. Key considerations here are to:

1. Train your leaders first in what the metaverse is, and its fundamentals – operation, access modes, uses, supporting technologies, regulatory considerations, benefits, and early-mover advantages.
2. Train your functional experts in the metaverse and considerations for strategy development, particularly marketing, sales, and HR.
3. Work with your IT teams to upskill them as necessary and to invest in the necessary software and systems to make your move to the metaverse – remembering that the early adopter advantage is key to success.
4. Consider partnering with specialist digital agencies or hiring subject matter experts to begin considering your meta-strategy from the top. Roll it out across the organization with thorough and robust communication and training programs.
5. Consider starting small, perhaps by securing your digital real estate location in your chosen metaverse/s. You can then move on to offer digital services, customer service, and other key customer-focused offerings. Introduce staff training as you build your experience, knowledge, and comfort in this fascinating online world.

In summary, the metaverse offers businesses and brands previously unimaginable ways of operating. Training and learning are greatly enhanced with powerfully immersive, targeted, measurable, and flexible learning environments. Together, these features offer higher engagement and better results than ever before.

If your business isn’t yet on the metaverse, now is the right time to make your move and gain that early adopter advantage!