Ontario Public service woos young recruits with Second Life

Via ITbusiness.ca

Second Life’s virtual world is providing real-world recruiting help to Ontario Public Service.

10/8/2008 5:00:00 AM By: Brian Jackson

A firefighter turns his hose towards the sparse collection of tall pine trees surrounding the building and aims its stream of water into the flames that are exploding outwards from the branches and foliage.

Protected by a heavy, flame-retardant vest and a helmet with a transparent face shield, he is doing his best to deter a total disaster.

But the conflagration is spreading – inexorably moving from one tree to the next and soon the entire landscape is ignited in an orange glow. The crackling sound is menacing and the fire’s determination to consume the building, unstoppable.

This would be one heck of an expensive and dangerous training exercise if it were happening in real life.

But it isn’t. It’s an experiment in Second Life, the virtual world designed and hosted by San Francisco-based Linden Lab Inc.  And the point of this flaming simulation isn’t to train a firefighter, but to give an average person an idea of what it might be like.

“You can don the firefighter gear that our Ministry of Natural Resources has and take on a fire in a simulation,” says Glen Padassery, acting director of the youth and new professionals’ secretariat at Ontario’s Ministry of Government Services. “That idea is you are a career tourist – you have a day-in-the-life type of interaction.”

Ontario’s Public Service is hoping to find new young professionals to replace its ageing workforce. As the average age of a Second Life user is 32, the virtual world is an ideal environment to attempt recruitment.

The award-winning simulation set up by the government may be a virtual island, but it isn’t alone.

Many organizations are turning to virtual worlds as a useful recruitment vehicle and honing techniques for measuring the success of such projects.

Analysts say it’s one more step towards virtual worlds becoming more mainstream and less dominated by a population of computer nerds.

“As youth move more towards the online space, we wanted to make sure we had a presence that would be fulfilling and meaningful to them,” Padassery says.

The government worked with New York-based virtual world design firm The SL Agency to launch a pilot in April. The team selected five of the 18 careers that Ontario was looking to draw attention to: firefighter, medical technician, civil engineer, economist, and traffic analyst.

“They wanted an experiential marketing package that would really show what it’s like to work as a fireman, or in a health clinic,” says Leigh Rowan, vice-president with The SL Agency. “Second Life is perfect for that.”

Aside from the forest fire simulation, users can take water samples from a virtual pond and analyze its contents. A healthcare simulation allows your avatar to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on a dummy, or watch a bank of television screens to monitor live traffic flow across the province – the real video feed supplied from real highway cameras.

“From Second Life, you can actually send HTTP requests,” Rowan explains. “So we bring in snapshots as thumbnails into Second Life. When you click on that, it launches into an actual video from that camera.”