Traditional Learning vs Virtual Learning in maintenance operations thoughts and reflections from a safety perspective

Flexibility in maintenance operations is one of the requirements for a successful management of capital asset industries nowadays. It demands both the deployment of technology, equipment and man-forces and to provide effective training to the technicians for maintaining the assets in a correct and safe way with short notice. In this scenario driven by time-pressure and high workload, traditional leaning systems could not give the necessary agility in terms of organizational and educational solutions. The use of Virtual Reality (VR) in the learning process could ensure the ability to react to unforeseen events that required more workers “ready-to-work”, providing valuable training and ensuring comparable levels of safety. The paper aims to explore and determine factors for testing training methods to safeguard the performance of the technicians reducing human errors and decreasing the time of training. Finally, it highlights when results between VR learning and traditional learning differ to avoid incorrect conclusions concerning the performance of the educational systems