Labor Official Sees Benefits in Virtual, Augmented Reality for Workforce Training

WASHINGTON, September 21, 2022 – The Labor Department is touting the ability of virtual and augmented reality tools to help employers train employees remotely, an industry event heard on Friday.

“You had companies like Tailspin who was in the XR [extended reality] space particularly using XR for training, mailing headsets to folks learning to be claims adjusters for companies like Farmers Insurance, and you would put on that headset and all of a sudden you were in a house that had a fire and you learn how to do an investigation of a house with a fire so you could do a claims adjustment,” Chike Aguh, the Labor Department’s chief innovation officer, said at the AR/VR policy conference Friday.

“This was in the height of 2020 when frankly we didn’t know how that was gonna turn out,” he added.

Aguh added that the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at the University of Maryland is using XR to assist vulnerable populations that are returning to their daily tasks following the pandemic.

XR technologies have been used during the pandemic to train workers, but it also has been used to retain them as well, according to one company.

These virtual reality tools helped increase company retention rate, said Dan Risko, governmental relations manager of TRANSFR Inc., which helps students train for the workforce using VR. He said that the retention rate climbed from 30 percent to 90 percent using these XR tools.

Risko said the company saw the results after putting people in a pre-apprenticeship program where people would perform the job before they had the job. He added the company has partnered with a workforce agency in the south that was having issues of worker retention.

Risko said TRANSFR has expanded training to community colleges and technical centers.