How VR Training Can Save Your Organisation Time and Money

A common misconception regarding virtual reality (VR) training for businesses is that it’s too expensive to generate a positive return on investment (ROI). The truth is that — while VR training does have somewhat higher upfront costs than traditional methods — the relatively low ongoing costs often make it an excellent investment.

Therefore, the real question is whether VR provides enough value for your specific business to make it worth that upfront expense. By examining the costs and benefits, you can determine whether implementing VR training is advantageous for your company.

Use Cases for VR Training

First, it’s important to consider how and why businesses use VR training. A 2023 survey of UK-based learning and development professionals found that 23% of respondents noticed higher knowledge retention with VR training, while 30% noted improved engagement levels. Nearly half of respondents said VR training is of higher quality than classroom or e-learning methods.

VR has become quite popular for recruiting and onboarding purposes, as candidates and new hires can gain meaningful experience by simulating the tasks they’ll perform for your business. If they make any mistakes, you can simply restart the VR module instead of implementing costly fixes to your real-life assets.

VR training is also valuable for ongoing training and employee development. In addition to safely simulating physical tasks — such as those in medical fields or hazardous environments, like construction or manufacturing — you can use VR to help employees develop soft skills.

For example, you could use VR to simulate discrimination scenarios while conducting a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training course. Or, set up a VR module to train employees’ leadership skills when developing them for management positions.

No matter how you use it, an advantage of VR training is the availability of data analysis. VR modules often track usage statistics, performance data, and engagement levels, allowing you to optimize your program once training is underway.

Upfront Costs: VR vs. Traditional Methods

Of course, the big upfront cost of VR training is the headsets themselves. That said, you might be surprised by how affordable VR headsets can be these days. For instance, you can now purchase the popular Meta Quest 2 All-In-One VR Headset for less than £200 each.

While headsets are a one-time upfront expense, you also must budget for content creation. Every time you want to develop a new VR training module, someone will need to create it. Due to the high degree of specialisation required to create VR training programs, most businesses outsource this step.

By the time curriculum designers, content specialists, and graphic designers get involved, VR training module content creation can cost several thousand pounds. While this is a significant investment, once your module is complete, you can use it over and over without incurring additional expenses.

Ongoing Costs: VR vs. Traditional Methods

While the upfront costs of VR training can be significantly higher than traditional “classroom-style” methods, one of the advantages of VR is the low ongoing expense. With classroom methods, companies often spend enormous amounts of money on travel, as training staff visit each business location to conduct training modules in person.

You can save some money on traditional training by opting for Zoom sessions instead of in-person training, but this comes with a risk of decreased engagement. VR presents a “best of both worlds” scenario, enabling businesses to keep recurring costs low while maintaining high levels of employee engagement.

We should also note the potentially significant time savings of VR training. According to a 2022 study by the professional services network PwC, VR training takes less time than either classroom or e-learning scenarios.

In fact, the study indicates that a training session that would typically take two hours in a classroom takes just 45 minutes in an e-learning module or a mere 29 minutes with VR. This statistic becomes even more impressive when you consider that it doesn’t account for the travel time required with traditional classroom-based training.

Conclusion

At scale, VR training is often far more cost-effective than traditional methods. The 2022 PwC study indicates that, for a company with 3,000 employees, VR training costs less than half as much to implement per employee than classroom training.

In general, the more learners you have, the higher your ROI will be with VR training. That said, even for smaller companies, the increased engagement and time savings of VR are well worth considering.

Contact us

Are you looking to create an VR training that uses gamification mechanics for effective learning and engagement? Then feel free to drop us an email at info@sbanimation.com, or give us a call on +44 (0)207 148 0526. We would be happy to help.

If you are unfamiliar with the virtual reality production process, this blog post What to expect when you work with Sliced Bread might serve to help you, it provides a complete guide on how we typically approach our projects, from concept to final delivery. It also provides information on how we structure our fees and plan the production schedule.

We also post industry related content to our LinkedIn company page, why not give us a follow?