3D Animation for Soft Skills Training

Have you considered making use of 3D animation for your company’s soft skills training? 

Soft skills training is used to describe the training that handles various human behaviours, traits and interactions. 

The aim of soft skills training is to enable your employees to better their existing skills in the work environment as well as teach them new ones. 

From dealing with complex situations such as workplace conflict to teaching employees how to effectively apply time management to their daily workflow. 

As you can imagine it can be really awkward to train your workers on sensitive subjects or to address their shortcomings directly. 3D animation can make the process of soft skills training much easier, below we’ll break down the different forms of soft skills training as well as cover the benefits of 3D animation:

What do Soft Skills Include: 

As mentioned above, soft skills are personality traits, social attitudes and behaviours that are conducive to a productive and healthy working environment. 

Arguably there are easily over thirty soft skills, but we’ll focus on the main ones:

• Leadership skills:  These skills translate to how well you are able to manage responsibilities in and amongst teams. 

• Communication skills: These skills dictate how well you communicate with fellow employees, management and your customers. 

• Problem-solving skills: Problem-solving skills are aimed at how you approach different problems you face in the workplace and how you aim to solve them. 

• Teamwork: Do you play well with others? Are you focused on working with your fellow employees to achieve results?

• Interpersonal skills: interpersonal skills refer to how well you build and maintain relationships with others, such as fellow employees, management and customer/suppliers 

• Adaptability: These skills translate to how well you adapt to different situations in and around your workplace.  
• Work Ethic: These skills enable you to manage yourself in your workflow allowing you to complete your work punctually and efficiently without the need for micromanagement.

The Benefits of 3D Animation:

To better understand why 3D animation could be used for soft skills training, we need to understand its benefits and how they can be applied to the training journey: 

• 3D Animation is Cost-effective:  Although 3D animation may not be as cost-effective as its counterpart 2D animation, it still reserves some of the same benefits. For example, 3D animation allows us to develop training content without any filming and travel. This greatly cuts down on time and costs spent producing the training content.

• 3D Animation is modular: 3D animation offers a level of modular application allowing you to update your soft skills training courses as needed. This could be due to you noticing gaps within your courses or simply because you would like to add additional content.
  
• 3D Communicates effectively: 3D animation has a wide variety of options when it comes to look and feel. This allows you to communicate topics regardless of how uncomfortable or complex they may be, in a way that is enjoyable. The ability to turn complex topics into fun pieces of content makes 3D animation one of the most effective ways of communicating.

Enhance your soft skills training with 3D Animation

Once you have your soft skills training up and running, the next step is to analyse the content’s performance to find gaps for complementary 3D content. As a general rule, if a sub topic is pivotal in understanding the overall topic and is rather complex then it should probably be enhanced with additional content to aid the learner in their topical proficiency. A similar rule applies to supplemental content, let your analytics guide you on which sub topics your students need additional help with and produce your supplemental content accordingly.

Choose the right software: The first thing you will need to do is choose the right software for 3D animation. This decision is best suited to your animation studio. This is where it helps to work with the same studio as they would have access to all the animation assets previously produced. The most costly part of 3D animation is the custom creation of animated assets, which makes it considerably more practical if they have access to all of them.

Understand the principles of animation: Before you start creating your animations, it’s important that you have a good understanding of the principles of animation. These include concepts such as timing, spacing, and weight, and will help you create animations that are both realistic and visually appealing. Prior project knowledge will also help streamline this process as every element of the project and the style of animation is already established. Many of these decisions are actually made when the initial 3D content is planned, and will determine the style and delivery of the animated content. At the end of the day your 3D animation should have a consistent production value and style otherwise it takes away from the professionalism of the content.

Use storytelling: One of the best ways to engage learners with your 3D animations is by incorporating a story into them. By using characters and a narrative, you can make the content more relatable and memorable. 3D is a considerably more immersive medium of animation as it allows you to leverage the 3D space with camera angles and movement which adds to the immersion of the content. This can also be used to enhance your storytelling.

Keep it simple: While 3D animation can be incredibly complex, it’s important to keep your animations simple and straightforward. This will not only make them easier to create, but also easier for learners to understand. There is a sweet spot when it comes to production value. Increasing the production value past that will cost considerably more does not necessarily enhance the content, rather they just look shinier.

Test and iterate: Finally, it’s important to test your animations and iterate on them based on feedback from learners. This will help you identify areas where the content may need to be improved or revised, and ensure that the final product is as effective as possible in helping learners develop their soft skills. Once again your analytics will aid you throughout this process. To ensure you get accurate data we recommend you stagger your soft skills training with assessments and quizzes. This will allow you to isolate each sub topic for accurate data. It also helps to mix up your training offering with downloadable content and even surveys to gain additional insights into finding informational gaps in your offering. Surveys will help you gain insights into content you do not have on offer. Do keep in mind that survey integration is dependent on the Learner Management System you are using to deliver your training content.

Conclusion

Soft skills in the workplace are what make us better at communicating and working with our fellow employees. Soft skills training no longer needs to be awkward or uncomfortable, by applying 3D animation, we are able to tackle these topics and situations in a fun and light-hearted manner – leading to more effective training. 

If you would like to know more about 3D animation get in contact with one of our team members today.

We are a leading video production company in Johannesburg and have one of the top learner management systems in South Africa. We specialise in Video Production, Photography, Graphic Design, eLearning Development, Web Design, Animation and Creative Consultation. | info@oliverkarstel.co.za | www.oliverkarstel.co.za | IG.com/oliverkarstel