Empowering Job Seekers with Disabilities through VR Training
Discover CCRW's innovative use of VR to support inclusive employment with the VirtualSpeech app
Highlights
Skills
Communication Skills
6,000+
minutes spent in VR
365+
training sessions completed
27%
increased in confidence scores
Customer Introduction
The Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work (CCRW) is a national non-profit that supports the equitable employment of people with disabilities. They provide job seekers with tools like job search support, workshops, and accommodation assessments.
The Goal
CCRW aimed to empower job seekers with disabilities by building their confidence in navigating workplace conversations around disability. Traditional role plays, while useful, were time-intensive for staff and often lacked the realism and psychological safety needed for clients to fully engage.
The objective for the first year was to complete a minimum of 330 VR-based activities that would help individuals strengthen their communication and self-advocacy skills in a supportive environment.
"VirtualSpeech has really enhanced our services and our ability to provide dynamic and customized trainings to support job seekers with disabilities and employers to increase their disability confidence."
Jeffrey Normore - Director of Digital Operations at CCRW
The Solution
Using the VirtualSpeech Roleplay Studio, the Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work (CCRW) created a series of custom AI-powered roleplay scenarios designed to simulate real-world workplace conversations around disability and employment.
With the no-code authoring tool, CCRW staff were able to design and deploy roleplay prompts focused on self-advocacy and requesting workplace accommodations.
These scenarios allowed participants to practice conversations such as:
- Explaining a disability to an employer
- Requesting workplace accommodations
- Responding to employer questions about accessibility needs
- Navigating difficult workplace conversations
Roleplay Studio enabled CCRW to quickly build these experiences without technical development, giving facilitators the ability to write prompts, define the role of the employer, and guide how the AI responds during the conversation.
Participants practiced these conversations in immersive VR roleplays, where they could safely experiment with different approaches while receiving feedback on communication skills such as confidence, clarity, and self-advocacy.
This approach allowed CCRW to scale training while reducing the staff time normally required to run traditional roleplays, and provided job seekers with a psychologically safe environment to practice asking for accommodations before entering the workplace.
Results and Benefits
- Confidence scores increased by an impressive 26.91%.
- The program achieved a Net Promoter Score of +70.
- 366 VR based activities completed.
- Over 6000+ minutes spent in VR.
