According to the Standard Occupational Classification system, all workers are classified into one of 840 occupations in our modern and complex society. Some of these professions will be familiar to you while others will bring you quite a foreign sensation. Here is a short list of various professions, to give you an idea of the type of experience each provides:

1. Craftsman
2. Factory worker
3. Extreme conditions worker
4. Salesperson in a shop
5. Teacher
6. Stock broker
7. Business to Business salesperson
8. Customer support representative or after-sales position
9. Actor, presenter or performer
10. Politician
11. Physician or nurse
12. Lawyer
13. Police officer, Firefighter
14. Military officer
15. Priest
16. Sportsman
17. Scientist, researcher
18. Engineer
19. Prison warden
20. Sailor

If you go through the list and try to picture each profession, it should give you a glimpse of the type of life each profession means. You can think of the day to day routine of an actor or police officer for example. Your brain simulation should challenge clichés and tell you for example that being an actor is not that glamorous and being a police officer is not about showing your authority.

Now, like for the age changing scenario, situations can also be experienced in Virtual Reality offline or online and a mix of the two will provide the most value in increasing your empathy for professionals in different fields than yours. The main difference is that online experiences provide more value here when compared to the age changing scenario. This as seeing a “uniform” on an Avatar makes it more “official” to people and their “belief” in the profession will be more real. They will act according to their experience and beliefs in the real world. Taking the example of the police officer, you can imagine how people will react to a virtual one in a simulated world. An other difference (compared to the age changing scenario) is that it will be harder to devise a virtual environment where anyone can do a specific job in a relevant and convincing way with no previous experience in it.

The mental exercise of putting yourself in the shoes of someone doing a different job is somewhat harder that changing your age, since some jobs can be quite foreign to you. Therefore the range of benefits of experiencing that job first hand in Virtual Reality are harder to predict. However, the impact on your empathy will still be significant, especially if the experience is repeated on a regular basis. An additional benefit is that it can teach you new skills. So this is another exciting field to explore in VR, that I believe can have long ranging benefits and consequences.

Let’s move on to changing your position inside your company in part 4.