The Benefits of Immersive Onboarding and Upskilling

Kyla Ball April 21, 2025

Whether bringing new hires up to speed or developing existing talent, an immersive approach to onboarding and upskilling delivers more engaging, memorable and scalable training experiences, leading to further benefits to both employees and their organizations. In this blog we take a detailed look at the ones that matter most.

What do we mean by Immersive Onboarding and Upskilling?

Immersive learning is an approach that simulates real-world environments using immersive technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 360° images and video, or interactive multimedia. It puts learners at the center of the learning experience, encouraging exploration and decision-making in a safe, repeatable space.

Unlike the passive content used in traditional methods of employee training, immersive training is active, engaging, and tailored to how people actually learn—by doing.

The Importance of Effective Employee Onboarding Programs

Start new employees on the right track from their very first day

An effective onboarding program that introduces new employees to the company culture and work environment within their first week can make a world of difference. However, with more remote employees working from home and an increasingly dispersed workforce, getting the onboarding experience right for new team members can be difficult.

A new employee’s experience of their first day can stick with them for the duration of their whole career. A great first day can help your new employees feel confident and excited about their decision to join your team.

Improve employee retention rates (and productivity)

Did you know that the onboarding training carried out in their first week can impact how long a new hire stays with the company? According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years or more if they have experienced effective new employee onboarding in the first few weeks.

They also state that organizations with structured, standard onboarding courses experience 50% greater productivity from new hires. This means that you not only save money on hiring and training but also start reaping the benefits of having your new employee on board right away.

Benefits of Using ThingLink to Create Your Employee Onboarding and Upskilling Training

Improve Employee Engagement with Bespoke Employee Onboarding Training

Want to provide the best possible employee experience from the minute your employee starts? Personalize your onboarding training according to their new responsibilities and environment. The benefit of immersive and interactive authoring tools like ThingLink is that they allow you to create a totally tailored onboarding experience. Add images, 3D maps or aerial views of the key facilities and workspace that your employees have access to. The onboarding content can be designed for any industry and skill level.

For example, by using ThingLink’s Scenario Builder to create and tailor your new hire training programs, every new employee is guaranteed a comprehensive, personalized, and consistent experience that you can fully adapt for them. Even translations are straightforward and almost instant

Make team building easier for all your new starters by adding team profile photos, short audio or video greetings from the key teammates they will work with, and other interesting tidbits about the organization’s culture-specific to your new employee or department.

Let Your New Employee Work at Their Own Pace

ThingLink allows employees to absorb as much (or as little) as they need from any immersive training program. You can start with a wide overview and add clickable pinpoints for those who would like to explore a topic in greater depth. This style of asynchronous training allows your employee to learn without the constraints and pressure of scheduling or the availability of other employees.

Convey Rich Visual Information

65% of people worldwide are considered “visual learners”, which is why incorporating visual elements in your new employee orientation program can be a huge help. Visual learning is more appealing than listening, and most of us respond and retain information faster (and more accurately) when it’s visually represented and not just textual and linear.

That’s because our brains are wired to process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, and 90% of the information stored in our brains is visual. In fact, nearly half of the nerve fibers connected to your brain are linked to your retina!

ThingLink uses the power of visual media (including maps, videos, and images) to create powerful, memorable new employee onboarding materials. Create introductions, interactive maps, scenarios, and visual depictions of complex information to facilitate learning and onboarding for your employees, fast.

ThingLink is the most powerful visual training tool on the market for technical and soft-skills development. Our solution has been tried and tested by colleges, corporations, museums, government departments, and classrooms around the globe.

With ThingLink, you can present complex information from real-world locations or service situations in an engaging virtual tour along with text notes, audio, and even embedded apps. This means that your training will appeal to various learning styles.

Data-Driven Insights

Are your new employees responding (or even using) your onboarding materials? Do you know if they watch the videos you share with them? Organizational users can access ThingLink’s statistics to track the completion rate and progress of learners, as well as the number of views, tag openings, actions, and time spent with the media for any custom date range, and then use this feedback information to make changes to the training materials.

Follow Natural Information Seeking Processes

By adding rich tags, questions, and deeper links that allow employees to dive deeper into specific details or topics of interest, you are copying the natural online information-seeking process that most of us utilize every day (without realizing it). You can reward learners by gamifying the experience and giving them points throughout the learning scenario. This encourages employees to delve into topics that interest them at their own pace, compartmentalizing and contextualizing the entire training using a single source.

Easily Accessible Content for Onboarding and Upskilling All in One Place

ThingLink allow you to organise and present your training modules in landing pages This not only means that new employees can refer back to their onboarding training time and time again, but the entire team (including your existing employees) can also benefit and access ongoing training as it becomes available. Everything is easy to update and change as things evolve.

No Technical Expertise Required

You don’t need technical expertise to create or use an employee onboarding program using ThingLink. The interface is highly intuitive and straightforward to use. Just drag and drop or upload your favorite videos, audio clips, or images as required. You can also add text and new features with a few simple clicks.

Use Your Existing Materials

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. With ThingLink, you can revitalize your existing materials by making them more interactive and visually appealing. Upload rich images and links from social media, games, YouTube videos, testimonials, and audio files with just a few clicks. Everything can be collected and viewed on a single platform.

Easy to Update

There’s no need to print and create complex onboarding documents and manuals that will become dated within months. Save the environment (and your money) by creating all the documentation and training materials you need during the onboarding process in ThingLink! Updates and changes can be made within seconds.

Create Rich Marketing and Brand Materials

You can embed ThingLinks anywhere — including your website or on-site landing pages. You can also share them on social media or download them to a device. This means you can share rich and engaging materials about the work that you do before you’ve even started interviewing to attract exciting new employees! Take a look at the example at the bottom of this blog, where Vaisala created an all-in-one campus tour of their R&D facilities to attract new talent, as well as educate and engage their global workforce.

Use Multiple Sources

You can add text and media, content from another website (like YouTube, Vimeo, or third-party iframes), polls, or even tour tags that link all your ThingLink scenes together.

Deliver the Same Training Content Across Multiple Devices

All ThingLink training content is shareable across a wide range of platforms and devices. Whether you want your learners to access onboarding and CPD materials via your LMS, remotely via their own mobile devices, in VR headsets (see below), or even in large scale shared immersive spaces – the training content you create with ThingLink is so versatile that it can do it all.

Cost savings and operational efficiency with ThingLink XR Training: Case Studies 

Mitsubishi Electric used ThingLink VR to deliver product training modules – cutting training costs by $260,000: Read more below:

WaterLAB used ThingLink’s AR App to develop training for water system engineers. Read more below:

Industries That Use ThingLink

Healthcare: Give patients or staff a complete walkthrough of your facilities without ever setting foot on the hospital campus, using ThingLink 360-degree views.

Human Resources: Onboard and train new hires using interactive materials that already exist. Breathe new life into your onboarding documents and HR paperwork with gamified learning scenarios.

Safety: Share important safety information and demonstrations with real-world walkthroughs and interactive training videos, then put their skills to the test with quizzes and polls.

Manufacturing: Showcase the entire manufacturing plant with floor plans and interactive maps that explain the various functions.

Retail: Create virtual in-store training and improve customer service skills with immersive simulations.

Military: Improve learning performance with realistic simulations and technical training in virtual environments. Share critical information safely and memorably with ThingLink.

Compliance: Compliance training doesn’t have to be tedious. Break down complex information into an engaging, interactive experience, gamify the materials for maximum engagement.

Employee Orientation

Work has become a lot more decentralized, and it’s relatively common for new hires to work remotely. However, even if you don’t come into the office every day (or if you are preparing to go to work for the first time), you’ll want to see some sort of visual representation of the physical workspace you’ll be joining.

You can give your new employees a 360-degree tour of your corporate facilities. It can reduce the anxiety new employees feel about joining a new environment for the first time. And for operationally critical industries like energy infrastructure, it can provide essential knowledge about the layout and details of each location that they are likely to visit. Take this example below from Finland, where the national electricity grid FINGRID used ThingLink to provide interactive introductions to each substation for new hires.

Introduce Your Customers

If your employee has to work in the field, you can let them know precisely what they should expect before they even meet their first customer. You can map all of the locations where they will work and add interactive notes about past projects, key decision-makers, and images. This will help them remember customer names and reduce the learning curve.

Customer Service Training

Are you branching out or training your staff to do something new? We’ve worked with brands all over the world to incorporate their most important customer service training materials into ThingLink. Take this example of hotel staff training for example:

How ThingLink Provides Scaleable Onboarding and Upskilling

ThingLink’s smart visual solution helps engage employees and introduce them to new environments and situations. Whether you operate a large enterprise or a small business, you can create interactive, compelling, and shareable visual onboarding presentations and simulations with a few simple clicks.

No prior technical or graphic design knowledge is required. Create simple, intuitive learning scenarios to kickstart your onboarding programs today. You also don’t need a studio or a VR headset to get started. 

In fact, with platforms like ThingLink, creating immersive experiences is accessible, cost-effective, and scalable for organizations of any size. Here are a few simple steps:

Start Small: Choose one high-impact onboarding or upskilling process to transform.

Use Existing Content: Repurpose images, videos, or SOPs into interactive modules that recreate real-world scenarios.

Collaborate Across Teams: Bring in subject matter experts, instructional designers, and frontline employees for input. This approach is even easier in a shared immersive space (see more below).

Pilot, Measure, and Scale: Test with a small group, collect feedback, and refine your approach before rolling out organization-wide or introducing VR training.

Other Applications for ThingLink With Your Team

ThingLink is used for variety of different applications in the workplace, including:

Ongoing employee training and CPD: Training isn’t restricted to onboarding and upskilling. Keep refreshing your employees’ skills for improved retention and satisfaction.

Team building: Use ThingLink to create exciting challenges, quizzes, and games that bring teams worldwide together. Take a look at this example where ThingLink has been used for virtual team building for nursing students. The University of Huddersfield compiled and published an academic study on their project. 

Virtual Tours: Give international employees, prospective hires, and clients a complete virtual tour of new (or existing) facilities from anywhere in the world. Use ThingLink to paint a picture of the work you do, a “Day in the Life”  and the impact you have. Vaisala used ThingLink to create virtual tours of their research and development campus to do just that. Read more below:

Make Existing Onboarding and Upskilling Materials Interactive with ThingLink

ThingLink offers an easy way to convert your existing training content into immersive and engaging courses and modules. Our AI generation tools can transform PDFs and slides in minutes, creating linear or branched modules and scenarios. Why not get in touch below to learn more?