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.
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.