May 22, 2025

4 Reasons Heavy Industry Leaders Are Turning to VR for Training

For industrial businesses, training often means juggling safety with speed, quality with cost, and consistency with flexibility.

Virtual reality (VR) offers a practical way to improve that balance.

VR doesn’t replace traditional methods overnight—it enhances what you already have with immersive, scalable tools that make training safer, more engaging, and more cost-effective.

Here are four ways VR will help your business:

1. Reduces costs across the value chain

VR allows trainees to work with realistic digital replicas of tools, machinery, or job sites – reducing or eliminating the need to transport equipment, fly in trainers, or send personnel to remote training locations. Faster learning also means reduced downtime, lower labor costs, and quicker ramp-up for new hires.

🟪 Take Boeing, for example: by implementing VR for complex assembly tasks, they cut training time by 40% and improved first-time quality by 78% - delivering major cost savings and measurable gains in safety and preparedness.

2. Improves safety & accessibility without sacrificing quality

VR training offers broad versatility, allowing trainees to practice a range of scenarios - from routine tasks to high-risk situations - all in a safe and controlled environment.

Trainees can learn and repeat exercises at their own pace, building muscle memory and confidence before stepping onto the job site. It also preserves institutional knowledge by embedding best practices from subject-matter experts directly into the training.

🟪 Stora Enso, a manufacturer of forestry products, deployed 25 Meta Quest headsets across teams, allowing multiple employees to train on standardized modules simultaneously. With multilingual content and remote access, the program could be rolled out to their diverse global workforce of 20,000+, increasing retention and accessibility while drastically lowering costs.

3. Makes training more repeatable, scalable – and memorable

VR modules can be reused and scaled across multiple locations – no classroom or instructor required. Trainees can move through lessons at their own pace, building confidence and retaining knowledge.

In fact, research shows VR learners retain significantly more information than those in traditional training settings, helping your teams apply what they learn more effectively.

🟪 Avangrid Renewables, which operates over 60 wind-powered energy facilities, used VR to standardize maintenance training. With 25 different turbine types, in-person training was inconsistent and costly. VR eliminated travel and unified procedures - cutting training time by an estimated 65% and reducing training costs significantly.

4. Tracks progress with built-in analytics

Many VR training platforms include built-in analytics that track performance – like completion rates, accuracy, response times, and error tracking – giving instructors real-time data to personalize training and issuing key insights to trainees for improvement.

This contributes to overall efficiency and effectiveness while supporting adaptive learning, where the difficulty adjusts based on real-time individual performance.

🟪 A 2025 study published in Virtual Reality investigated the efficacy of adaptive training in immersive VR for fine motor tasks. Participants who underwent adaptive training demonstrated a 19% improvement in task accuracy and a 17% increase in task speed within the virtual environment compared to those in non-adaptive training groups.

🟪 In a real-world example, Delta Air Lines used analytics to scale training for aircraft de-icing procedures – boosting daily technician checks from 3 to 150 (a 5,000% increase) and cutting training time from 8 hours to just 2.

VR training isn’t a futuristic concept…

…it’s already delivering real results for heavy industry enterprises. By adding VR to your training toolkit, you can reduce costs, improve safety, standardize skill development, enable long-term knowledge-sharing, and track performance at scale.

Whether you’re enhancing an existing program or starting from scratch, immersive training opens the door to smarter, more accessible and more effective workforce development.

Ready to explore VR training for your team?

We’re making it easy to try before you commit.

Through our partnership with Meta, you can now try Meta Quest 3 or 3s for free!

We'll equip your trial kit with your preferred VR software, or recommend one that matches your use case, to ensure the best possible experience.

And, once you've completed your trial, we offer expert guidance and custom kits to make getting started easy for classrooms, field teams, job training labs, and beyond.

⭐Apply now to try VR training for FREE →