Learning Experiences Improved Using Immersive Simulations & Data - Merck Interview - CLO Symposium

How learning experiences were improved at Merck through the use of immersive simulations and data from ETU - discussed here: https://www.etu.co/resources/panel-discussion-simulation-effectiveness Theresa Zeller, Global Head of Integrated Learning Experiences at Merck and Jennifer Iannetta, Lead Learning Architect MMD, Integrated Learning Experience at Merck talk to Ashley St. John at CLO Symposium about their experience with Immersive Simulation and working with ETU. Jennifer Iannetta: We really really did see the promise in immersive scenario-based simulation with data. And we saw the promise in terms of, it was scientific-based, so there's a learning science behind it. It's innovative, it's learner-centric, and it's outcomes-focused. It's really about being able to see and demonstrate skills and behaviors that our workforce needs. We also believe that our learners could benefit from this method and the technology, and it would actually enable them to make mistakes in a safe environment, learn and grow in those situations that they really do face every single day in their work. And from a business value, we thought our business could benefit because we saw the promise of the quantitative data, so the quantitative behavior change. And the data that we believe we were going to be able to see to make decisions on how to best remediate, reinforce skill areas where we were able to see there were common mistakes being made in the simulation. I'm gonna let Theresa share a little bit more about how we thought about the business areas and some of our logic in our approach. Theresa Zeller: we really took a experiment, test-and-learn approach. And we initiated a few proof of values, particularly in three, specific areas. One of our first proof of values was around technical capabilities and it was in one of our manufacturing sites in biotechnology. Were focused on critical aseptic mindsets and techniques. This means lost batches which are costly for the business. So there was a strong business case and as we spent a lot of time in face-to-face training to ensure good, aseptic behavior, we were still seeing that there was a significant opportunity for improvement that we believed this technology could help us close. The second proof of value we took on was in soft skills. And this was our own L&D practitioners. We had just put in a new operating model in place which required our team members to work differently together. And there were both mindset and skillset shifts that were important to transition into this new model. Specifically, we focused the simulation on critical skills that have high impact on our folks, peoples ability to be able to performance-consult and align with the business in what we call our discovery phase. And in the early portion of our learning creation phase where we analyze and blueprint our learning experiences. We thought it was really important also for us to take a bit of our own medicine and really experience the technology ourselves, that we were looking to leverage and utilize with our clients. It also enabled the L&D organization to get familiar with this technology that we were testing so that they could be able to describe it to our clients. And then the third area was in diversity and inclusion. And this was an off-the-shelf program that ETU had already built for us; the first two were custom that we built. The D&I was important because it's a highly important and valued aspect of our culture. And much of our D&I work had been awareness-based and we really felt like we needed the opportunity to give our employees a chance to get in there and really challenge their mindsets and skills with these immersive simulations. - Again, these were real, live experiences with this method and this technology. In fact, we found that the production time was significantly decreased, including the SME review time. And as I'm sure everyone can imagine, usually, you need to be very, very conscious of the time that you're taking from an SME because you are taking them out of their work. As for the measures, you heard again, earlier, that this simulation itself generated very rich data and analytics for us and we felt we could make so many more conscious and well informed decisions on behalf of our people, but also on behalf of how we invested the company's time and money. The key is to identify those metrics and measures from the beginning and we did that on each and every proof of value. In the case of the sims we did discuss, we were very clear before we got started on the problems we were trying to solve for, and we were also very clear on what good needed to look like in terms of the skills and the behaviors, and what was the most optimal decision and why was that an optimal decision, so that we could reach the results that you saw.