Is VR the Future of Workplace Training? 5 Companies Think So

With over 170 million people who are active virtual reality users, and an additional 41 percent of adults are interested in trying it, VR is a subject that everyone is consistently discussing at home and at the office.

As VR continues to disrupt the gaming, education, and workplace industries, it seems as if the expectations are endless for what will happen next. In the corporate world, VR is being used to create a more streamlined and immersive experience that will allow for a different type of workplace training.

Here are five companies who are testing the waters and incorporating VR into their employment practices:

Honeygrow

Honeygrow is a Philadelphia-based healthy fast food chain that provides “farm-to-fork, stir-fry and salads”.

New hires are being introduced to the company and its founder, Justin Rosenberg, with a VR headset in a virtual restaurant. Trainees get all of their onboarding information from history of the company to its philosophy, and are provided the opportunity to practice with actual food-prep techniques.

Honeygrow has reported that this learning technique has increased the workers’ comprehension and interest in the overall process.

Walmart

Walmart employs 1.4 million people alone in the United States and trains over 140,000 new members onto their team every year. Walmart now utilizes VR for management, customer service, and sales training.

Picture this: a Black Friday rush, finding missing produce prices, following proper protocols for cleaning, or handling disgruntled customers. These are the types of situations a trainee might encounter while experiencing working at Walmart.

By incorporating VR into the onboarding and training process, Walmart can better prepare their new hires with these real world scenarios.

UPS

UPS is beginning to train student drivers with VR at nine of its training facilities. The drivers will experience a variety of road simulations with potential hazards they might encounter such as pedestrians, oncoming traffic, and parked cars.

For now UPS plans to utilize VR for package delivery drivers, but plans to expand the usage of virtual reality and augmented reality for other training purposes in the near future.

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Fried chicken and VR? Two things you wouldn’t imagine working together. Now add in an escape room. KFC is utilizing VR and a “virtual training escape room” to train new employees to craft their one of a kind fried chicken.

The game? Learn to cook a delectable chicken in an eerie KFC while the Colonel Sanders himself tells you what to do. Talk about preparing for anything! While this is still in beta, KFC does plan to implement it into their training program in the near future.

Volkswagen

With plans to train over 10,000 employees in over 30 different areas from customer service to vehicle assembly, Volkswagen is taking VR training to the next level.

Volkswagen says that the goal of this is to be able to educate employees across multiple brands and create a more efficient workflow that allows employees to train at a pace they are comfortable with, without having to travel.

So what’s next? As VR workplace training is being adapted across small and large brands, new hires will see more tech-savvy training being implemented wherever they head next in their career path.