More employees are strapping on virtual reality headsets as the immersive technology becomes an increasingly common method for workforce training on a range of topics, from hardware maintenance to leadership and empathy.
Companies such as United Parcel Service and Walmart have taken a slow but measured approach to adopting a technology that has drawn extreme hype and extreme skepticism over the years as businesses have tested, piloted and pulled back on various uses.
“It’s an interesting, but slower than expected journey. But for training—I think VR will always be a good way to use it,” said Johan Hellqvist, head of mobile and XR/3D at Volvo Group, about the process. The company today uses VR to train employees on actions like replacing the battery on an electric truck.
UPS is using it to train drivers on areas like how to stack packages or handle certain situations in the field like a dog attack. Companies like Walmart are even using it to train employees on so-called “soft skills,” like how to show empathy when dealing with a frustrated customer.
Virtual reality has been around for decades, but only became commercially available to consumers and enterprises in the past 10 to 12 years, said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen. At the peak of its hype three years ago, companies said they were exploring a range of use cases from virtual reality office meetings to buying ads in the metaverse.
Many of these failed to prove out their value as companies realized that Microsoft Teams or Zoom could do the meeting job at a sliver of the cost of bulky headsets, Nguyen said. Meta Platforms’s Reality Labs division, in many ways seen as a barometer of the tech’s adoption, has struggled to attract and retain users and incurred an operating loss of more than $16 billion in 2023.
But VR hardware and software has improved and become more affordable. Headsets are sleeker and less likely to give users motion sickness. Companies have also developed broader content libraries for what can be experienced in VR. Thanks to those developments, as well as years of trial and error over what use cases actually deliver value, companies say virtual reality has the potential to augment and even improve upon real-world training, encompassing more and more roles and tasks.
“The way people learn is fundamentally changing, and VR is what is driving that change,” said Brad Scoggin, co-founder and chief executive of ArborXR, a company that helps manage and integrate virtual reality devices and content and works with UPS and Volvo, among others.
“Doing, say, harassment training in VR is much more effective than watching a video with actors,” he said. “In VR, you can actually put a headset on and experience what it’s like to be in somebody else’s shoes.”
Companies are doing a mix of creating their own virtual reality training content and outsourcing it from third parties, and using headsets from a range of providers, including Meta, HTC, Pico, Apple and Lenovo.
It can still be an expensive effort, with a minimum six-figure investment required to get started—regardless of whether companies are creating or outsourcing content, Gartner’s Nguyen said. But enterprises say that it still works out to be less expensive than traditional methods that in some instances require equipment and travel.
For many companies, it’s been a slow, ongoing effort. UPS created an Immersive Technology division in late 2019. At the time, a lot of training was tethered to a physical computer and involved just watching a screen, said Mark Gröb, who has led the division since its inception.
Today, use of VR for some aspects of driver training at UPS is a mature practice, Gröb said. For example, UPS offers “pre-trip” training in VR, walking trainees through a checklist of tasks they need to complete before hitting the road. UPS is working to scale beyond drivers to other roles in the business, like package operators at logistics hubs, he said.
Police departments across the country are using virtual reality to train officers on how to use their weapons proficiently and how to interact with civilians in the field.
“We’ve had our officers sitting there putting this on their head, and they felt like they were really there, and they’re reacting as though they’re really on the street. They’re yelling at people in the scenario, telling them to drop the weapon,” said Chris Botzum, Deputy Police Chief, Joliet Illinois Police Department.
High-cost, high-risk scenarios like these are where VR training is most valuable, said Nguyen. But companies are also using it for so-called soft skills.
London-based financial services company St. James’s Place uses VR to train financial advisers on how to engage with clients in various scenarios. In one VR scenario, they meet with mixed-sex couples and then are given feedback based on whether they spend more time addressing the man than the woman—a common problem in the industry, said Nicki Finnigan, the company’s director of learning and development.
For skills like this, VR can be substantially more expensive than real-world training, which would typically involve just people in a room speaking, said Finnigan. But she said she feels it’s more effective. Groups of trainees don’t have to wait while each one plays out mock scenarios with the trainer, and they’re more comfortable acting and making mistakes in VR than they are in front of a class of peers.
Walmart similarly uses VR to train its store associates in scenarios like how to interact with a frustrated customer. Doing this training in VR also gives the company more data on how associates are performing, compared with traditional methods, said Jen Buchanan, vice president of the Walmart Academy training program. The team is able to get better information about which associates made right or wrong choices during the scenario, which helps refine training, she added.
Buchanan said Walmart is leveraging VR for scenarios that are “rare or difficult to practice.” When it comes to skills like leadership or teaching company values and purpose, gathering associates for an in-person training still makes the most sense, she added. “I think it’s based on the scenario.”
