Education in Using Virtual Reality in Supported Employment and Career Counselling

<< Background >>We have applied to develop new skills of our staff - career counsellors and professionals providing supported employment. Thanks to new skills we wanted to be able to have new tools, new technologies for providing services to our clients. We wanted to help our clients, who are people with various disabilities, to be better prepared for jobs and labour market.Before the project, we had known that virtual reality worked great in the area of supported employment (SE), but only in a very limited way. We had had ideas about how to use it to a greater extent for our clients, but we had lacked the skills to do it, and we had not had a detailed idea of how to incorporate it into our service. We also had not had relevant scenarios for our clients, and we had known that it was not sufficient to rely on a professional scenario creator. We also had not had sufficient equipment to use VR in our practice.<< Objectives >>The objective was to train our staff in using VR within SE and career counselling (CC) for disadvantaged individuals. A key goal was to equip our team with the skills to create and adapt VR scenarios tailored to the specific needs of our clients, allowing them to develop both hard and soft skills in a safe and controlled environment. We wanted to include VR in our practises and support the partners among each other and exchange experience about that and gaining experience with using virtual reality.We also intended to share our practice with other professionals to motivate them to use VR as well and we wanted to make it easier for them thanks to our experience.<< Implementation >>We organized four training activities for a group of counsellors and job coaches from agencies of supported employment. During training activities the professionals learned about VR, technological conditions, equipment etc. And they learned how to design and create their own scenarios for VR. The professionals tested using of these scenarios with their clients and reported about this testing in their reports. They also shared their practise with other professionals in their countries as well as with other professionals on European level.<< Results >>The partners organizations from Czech Republic, UK, Poland and Romania have got trained teams who can use VR in their practise, who can create their own scenarios for their clients according to their needs, they have relevant equipment to use it, they had developed scenarios which they can use in VR. Thanks to that their clients may use new tools. They have established useful networks in their countries as well as with the other project partners which enable them to continue with their activities.Beside that we prepared materials for other followers: the best practice report and the handbook.