A Career Simulator in the Metaverse

We are committed to solving the massive need for rapid upskilling and reskilling of workers displaced by automation in India and Indonesia. 

India will have 69 percent of its jobs in the formal employment automated by 2030 (McKinsey, 2020), whereas sixteen percent of current work activities in Indonesia can be automated by 2030, replacing the output of 23 million workers (Mc Kinsey, 2019). 

To confront the massive disruption brought by automation, there is a dire need for reimagining job retraining and workforce skills development. Our solution upskills / reskills displaced workers through experiential immersive training in the metaverse. 

Workers can visit future workplaces in 3D and step into the shoes of professionals in daily work scenarios captured through 360° video.  If deployed, this solution would offer a scalable, affordable and future-proof training tool for displaced workers in India and Indonesia to find the shortest path to their future jobs. 

Within the Future of Work in India and Indonesia challenge, we are dedicated to solving the specific sub-challenges of the scale and speed at which experiential  training solutions are needed to fill the skills gap created by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the age of automation. 

• SCALE : As much as 20% of the workforce in Indonesia, according to McKinsey estimates, may need to shift occupational categories and learn new skills in the coming years. The current educational requirements of the occupations that may grow are higher than those for the jobs displaced by automation. The fastest rate of job growth will be for occupations currently requiring a college or advanced degree. According to reports, less than 5% of India’s total workforce has undergone formal skill training compared to 68% in the UK, 75% in Germany, 52% in the USA, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea.

• SPEED : Mc Kinsey’s 2019 report uses the analogy of the transition of the labor force out of agriculture in the early 1900s in the United States and Europe, and more recently in China. However, those earlier transformations of the workforce make-up took place over several decades, which gave time to older workers to retire and new entrants to the workforce to transition. today change is coming in at exponential speed. 

• UNCERTAINTY: 31 percent of executives in the world admit they currently lack a “good understanding of how automation and/or digitization will affect our future skills needs.” (McKinsey, 2018). How can we prepare workers to a future of work which remains so uncertain and ambiguous? 

Our solution serves both job seekers and job creators.

- We help workers find scalable, affordable and accessible solutions to train and retrain in future-proof sectors. They are currently underserved because they are either skilled in soon-to-be-automated fields, or not trained at all. But they are fluent with digital tools, smartphones, internet browsing. 

- We help job creators, entrepreneurs, employers understand the transformations at stake so they can better anticipate the future skills they will need to train /prepare their workers for.  They are currently unable to anticipate the future and feel ill-prepared for it. 

We conducted design thinking workshops with both populations in the context of our project with the National Employment Office in France. We elaborated empathy maps for both populations and designed user journeys to directly address their needs. 

Our immersive training solution is fully aligned with this unprecedented challenge, as it is an affordable and equitable training solution which can deliver transformative and experiential professional training to millions of Indian and Indonesian workers at scale on skills and jobs of the future in a context of ambiguity and uncertainty.

If we need to train for a specific skill, we develop an immersive module once and this module can subsequently be followed by millions of workers or job seekers. Such is the extra-ordinary power of immersive training that can rapidly provide cost-effective and efficient training solutions for upskilling/reskilling workers at a massive scale.

Furthermore, this challenge is original as it invites us to prepare for the uncertain and ambiguous shift in the skills that will empower workers to prosper in tomorrow's job market. Traditional training vectors in the physical world cannot prepare workers for a future job market that doesn’t even exist: they can only work with the constraints of the existing world. On the contrary, we can easily 3D-model workplaces of the future and provide a future-proof training environment to acclimate workers and employers to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity: adaptability as a meta-competency will be key to securing future prosperity. 

Finally, our solution is fully aligned as it provides more egalitarian work opportunities especially for the historically marginalized: in the metaverse, anyone can get training in any career, freed from the invisible or visible barriers caused by prejudice and bias linked to gender, class, ethnicity, etc. 

Alexandra Ivanovitch, PhD is an award-winning creative technologist who produces high-impact virtual reality (VR) applications for local and national governments. Her first ventures in the field of conscious VR were sponsored by the creators of Star Trek. Her work has been covered by Forbes, WIRED, CNN, the Nikkei, etc. 

Our career simulator is the first of its kind: it will offer equitable and personalized access to immersive and experiential training to future skills and jobs. The challenge we face is a challenge of imagination and anticipation at its core: who knows exactly what the worlds of work will look like in 2030 or 2050? And subsequently how to best prepare workers for this uncertain future? 

There is a pressing need for a nimble and adaptive training solution that can model these futures and help workers navigate through them, so they can build resiliency and acclimate to an ever-changing work landscape in the metaverse first, before transferring these meta-skills to the real world.  

The solution is radically innovative as it has never been experimented with before in this specific use case and proposed magnitude. Bill Gates announced earlier this month he thought we would have business meetings in the metaverse, but that is all he foresaw. During the pandemic, a few VR and crypto conferences took place on social VR platforms, but all they did was essentially facilitating meetings. 

This career simulator in the metaverse has the potential to act as a catalyst in this emerging space of VR trainings. It constitutes the digital infrastructure for a future skills training hub in the metaverse, which can welcome our natively-developed trainings, as well as modules and full-blown training solutions (in 3D or through 180° / 360° videos) developed by third parties.

It is a social webVR platform which allows users to generate their personalized 3D photorealistic avatars and access computer-generated work environments and 360° simulations. 

The "metaverse" can be used as a marketing catchphrase, but webVR is a technological reality: a network of immersive spaces interconnected to each other. 

Core features include: 

- Authorized and secure access according to different user profiles: students / Technical Colleges recruiters / administration

- Access to virtual work environments and inspirational environments via a computer-generated avatar

- Real-time screen and webcam sharing

- Ability to import 3D objects in real time into virtual environments. 

The simulator is accessible through the web. Because it is web-based and social, it means that our career simulator is: 

- scalable: no need for expensive bespoke hardware options and elite headsets. Our simulator runs obviously on all virtual reality headsets, but also on personal computers, tablets and smartphones. This universality of access ensures that the benefits of this simulator will rapidly disseminate and reach underserved populations who most need it. 

- engaging: functionalities incorporated in the simulator encourage interaction between learners (possibility to chat, pre-baked avatar animations, possibility to take a selfie inside of 3D environment to create memories and save memorabilia after the experience "I was there"), 

- “future-proof”: the landscape of software frameworks and hardware options in the virtual reality space is fairly volatile, so it is important that our solution be anchored on a technology that is here to last, regardless of XR trends: the web. 

The root cause we have identified as the problem to address is the pressing need for massive, scalable and cost-effective upskilling / reskilling solutions for uncertain and ambiguous future jobs.  

Our theory of change is the following: 

• Activity: by going through the Career Simulator, users will pre-visualize a variety of potential futures of work, access a hybrid of computer-generated and 360° video-based simulations which provide experiential and immersive training for a diverse set of future-ready skills and jobs.  

• Output: workers will gain an experiential understanding of future skills and jobs to be mastered to prosper in tomorrow’s economy as they will have pre-lived a series of practical scenarios through immersive technology.

• Short-term outcome: workers will gain resiliency, adaptability and future-readiness as they acclimate to this fast-changing landscape of work, 

• Long-term outcome: as shifts happen, workers will implement the meta-skills practiced at length in the metaverse and transfer the benefits of these experiential and immersive trainings from the virtual to the real world. 

Now that we have implemented this solution with local and national government in Florida and in France,  our goal is to replicate in other countries. 

The fact that we already have set up a precedent with the 4th largest school board in the US and with a national government in Europe is a powerful argument for other stakeholders to follow suit.

Our goals include: 

- developing a more extensive range of career simulations to cover more industries and opportunities for the communities we serve,

- testing with diverse populations in more states to better understand how to create transformational virtual experiences which will have impact on a diverse set of cultural backgrounds, 

- collecting longitudinal data to better assess the sustainability of the impact we strive to generate, and notably the conversion rate between exposure to the virtual reality simulator, enrollment, graduation from a technical college program and employment.

Below is a set of specific and measurable indicators we use to measure progress: 

- Number of 360° simulations produced

- Number of workplaces digitized 

- Number of daily users (job seekers / employers)

- Number of virtual job interviews held on our platform

- Number of jobs found thanks to our tool   

The current barriers we are experiencing are mostly financial and data-related. 

• We have already overcome most technical barriers and figured out how to host interactive hybrid 3D/360° experiences on the web in a networked setting for multiple users to enjoy. 

• There are currently no legal barriers. 

• We need to test our solution with a larger population set to collect more data and iterate more quickly.

• Technical barriers: we plan on investing more time and resources to perfect the optimization process for 3D workshop environments. We are going to figure out a way to host more users simultaneously in the same 3D environments to perfect the social aspect of the experience. (Right now, our experiences are designed to have 25 concurrent users.)  

• Financial barriers: we are planning on raising funds from other sources of funding than the school boards to compensate for budget cuts in a proactive approach. 

• Data-related barriers: we plan on partnering with more school boards, workforce boards and different stakeholders which are invested in the future of work in order to test our solution further. 

There are 6 collaborators working on the Career Simulator: 

• 4 full-time employees: 

  • 1 360° video producer, 

  • 2 3D designers: one is focused on designing the workshop 3D environments, the other on modeling the 3D avatars of real-world professionals, 

  • 1 developer focused on webVR, 

• 2 half-time collaborators: 1 2D designer focused on branding and social media, 1 2D video producer

The majority of colleagues are people of color, and the CEO is a white female. 

We place constant emphasis on building a diverse team right from the start of our onboarding process and throughout the lifecycle of our development by sharing and cultivating our origin story. 

We were founded thanks to the support of the Roddenberry Foundation, started by the family of the creator of Star Trek. Star Trek as a TV series was revolutionary in that it portrayed a radically inclusive team of peaceful space explorers collaborating towards a shared goal. 

We often use this metaphor of Star Trek to reconnect to the root cause of why the organization started, and how we can embody the ideals of peaceful explorers in tech for good. We even 3D-modeled a 3D spaceship we use as team meeting space so we can reconnect to the WHY of our org more easily. 

- MIAMI-DADE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS: We have developed a VR career simulator for their students so they can test-drive different professional futures thanks to immersive technology. We have a recurring contract with them, and we are building different types of simulations year after year to cover more and more career tracks. 

- NATIONAL EMPLOYMENT AGENCY (French Government): We have developed a Virtual Employment Agency which allows job seekers to do a 3D quiz to unearth their competencies, to immerse themselves in the daily lives of professionals, to be connected to employers and meet recruiters in immersive meeting rooms. 

- UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE (US Congress). We have developed a VR peacebuilding platform to facilitate interfaith dialogue through shared virtual pilgrimage experiences in the metaverse. Currently pilot-tested in Lahore, Pakistan. 

Our current business model is B2G. Governments are our early adopters, and the direct channels that can connect us to millions of users who access daily government services. 

The key beneficiaries are the citizens who access these essential government services (career orientation / retraining) for free. 

Our unique value proposition is that we have easy access to a scalable experiential training tool that empowers them to be equipped with the skills of tomorrow.

We are applying to this challenge because we want to scale up our solution and open it up to new parts of the world. We have already worked with Pakistan and designed culturally specific assets (videos, avatar clothing, 3D environment) for this part of the world, so we know our solution has great potential to be deployed with success to India and Indonesia. 

Our solution pertains to the cross-culturally appealing domain of avatars, virtual reality and immersive technology. 

Now we are eager to develop India and Indonesia-specific content (360° videos, environments). 

We would greatly benefit from support on a variety of points: 

• Iterating on our business model to ensure financial sustainability during uncertain times,

• Co-designing future variations of the Career Simulator

• Helping us identify additional talent we can invite to come on board to grow our team and sustain our scaling up dynamic,

• Raising awareness about the initiative and helping spread the word to gain more traction and make sure people who need the Career Simulator will actually hear about it.