VR health and safety training: where it works in high-risk industries

VR health and safety training works best where a mistake is dangerous, expensive or rare: high-voltage isolation, locating buried services, fire response. It lets people practise the real task safely and records how they did. For knowledge a short video or a 3D standard can teach faster, something lighter is usually the better choice.

Workplace injury is still common. HSE estimates that 680,000 workers were injured at work in 2024/25. Much of the training meant to prevent that is still delivered through slides, documents and toolbox talks, which tell people what to do without letting them do it.

VR is worth the investment when at least one of these is true: the task is too dangerous to practise for real, it happens too rarely for people to stay sharp, practising it physically is expensive or disruptive, or you need evidence that someone can do it, not just that they attended.

Cable strikes are a good example. For Murphy Group we built CAT and Genny training with a custom tracked controller that handles like the real tool, so operatives practise locating buried services in scenarios no training pit can safely recreate. Alongside it, an AR hazard perception app keeps frontline leaders' hazard spotting sharp between courses.

Electric vehicles have changed what technicians need to know, and high-voltage work leaves no room for error. At the Stellantis Performance Academy, technicians and apprentices practise the high-voltage power-down procedure in VR step by step, with every attempt feeding the academy's learning system.

Fire response is rare by nature, which is exactly why it needs practice. THG Labs staff tackle virtual fires with real extinguishers inside their own facility using mixed reality, and at NSK Europe's Safety Day 53 employees went through VR fire training in a single day.

Not every safety problem needs a headset. Site inductions often work better as a photoreal 3D walkthrough of the real site on any device, with hazards marked where they occur, which is how Murphy Group and Costain run theirs. Safety standards that live in documents nobody reads work better as short 3D scenes of the correct method, as Northumbrian Water and Thames Water use them. And plain knowledge is often fastest as short eLearning.

The right answer is usually a mix: VR for the high-risk practical moments, and lighter formats for everything around them.

Real tools, or tracked props that handle like them, so the skill transfers. Your own sites, equipment and procedures, not a generic environment. Training designed around the decisions people make, not just a sequence of steps. Data that shows who completed what and how they performed, ideally flowing into your existing learning system. And standalone headsets that run without a PC, so the training can go where your people are.

Start with the incidents and near misses that worry you most, and the tasks behind them. That shows where practice would make the biggest difference, and whether VR, mixed reality or something lighter is the right format. If you're working through that, we'd like to hear about it.