Create your future” is a proof of concept (POC) that I created to ideate how to provide an immersive, simulated virtual reality (VR) environment for professionals to visualize different career paths in an organization. This allows people to drive their career by providing a simulated experience of their career choices and helps them move from one specialty area to another, thereby helping the organization retain tech talent. This is targeted at professionals in their second-year in the organization (employees that are in internship or junior recruitment).

The VR environment will allow the users to build and experience an “hour in the life” in the role that they are interested in. It will also provide interactive learning paths that help them reach this role and mentor videos for any career advices.

The hardware component of this system accommodates the Oculus (known as Meta now) Go, a head-mounted display (HMD) needed for virtual reality and the hand-held controller that the user can use to navigate the VR space with.

The VR experience begins with a virtual host explaining the goal and controls of the experience. The space is titled "Do it your own way" and it has click boxes that the user can choose to select a time in a day, a technology, a country, and a work place that the user may want to explore. The user's surroundings change as per the selections.

Once the user has built this future role of choice, the user is shown the learning path to achieve this. This would include references to the trainings, certifications, technical and soft skills. It also will contain mentor videos and name of the "champions" who can help the user achieve the role.

The entire experience was created using Amazon Sumerian. All the user interactions in the VR environment are tracked through xAPI connectors in an LRS.

This was presented at the annual team meet in Toronto in October 2019 with a positive reception with a lot of member firms reaching out on the use cases.