VIRTUAL REALITY TRAINING SYSTEM FOR IMPROVING INTERVIEW PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Technology has been evolving radically over the last 25 years, creating consequently a wide range of IT related jobs, including software development, networking or database administration. Unfortunately, software engineers have to overcome many difficulties in order to perform well at their interviews and obtain their dream job. Having a great CV and knowledge is not enough, as both hard and soft skills must be proven at the interview. In order to achieve good interview performance, training becomes essential, especially for people who show signs of insecurity, introversion or lack of social contact. Job interview training should always be based on practice, not on theory, but even in this case, the existing methods of simulating an interview can have their drawbacks. Our paper proposes an innovative training system based on virtual reality (VR), meant to improve the interview performance of software engineers. By combining two emerging technologies, chatterbots and virtual reality, our system can reproduce in a precise manner the situation of an actual interview. Based on their chosen enterprise, the users will find themselves in different interview rooms (simulated through 3D environments) and will have to interact with different avatars, representing the interviewers. Both technical competencies and soft skills can be practiced in the system, as the chatterbot is trained to give relevant questions and to react accordingly to the user’s answers. Besides the real-time feedback, an evaluation module is also present in order to help the user assess the results of their performance. The system has a high degree of modularisation, thus easily allowing the integration of a text-to-speech module for visually impaired people.