Vocational education on new tracks: expert workshop with employer representatives

We have spent the last few weeks setting our project on the right track we have finalized the paperwork, had some internal brainstorming sessions and designed the workshop we would like to tell you about in this blog post.

Our project “Immersive Future: Rail” has a very clear mission: we want to bring rail construction trainees as close as possible to the reality of their future career - before they even take their first step on a real construction site. To this end, we have planned to use virtual reality technology to immerse students in the world of their future workplace and discover the challenges that await them there.

You're probably wondering how the specialists in new technology and education plan to create VR material that faithfully reflects the nature of railway work? The answer is simple: they have experts at their side who know this world inside out - a construction company specialising in railway work!

That is why we have planned an intensive expert workshop with our partner MELTOR, which has been active in the railway construction industry for more than 35 years, before moving on to scenario building and source collection.

On the 8th of May we met at the Partner's headquarters to.... immerse ourselves in the reality of working on the tracks! We discussed every detail together for many hours:

• What are the typical tasks carried out on a railway construction site?

• What kind of employees does the company employ?

• What challenges do employees and employers face every day?

• What is the career path, development opportunities, training?

• What knowledge, skills and attitudes do employers look for when recruiting?

During the workshop, we used a set of materials and tools that facilitated and enhanced our work together. In addition to the workshop script, which organised the range of information needed to understand the specifics of the industry and established the initial flow for the conversation, we used a whiteboard in Miro prepared especially for the workshop as a backdrop and support for noting down the most important aspects. In addition, we used a projection technique - the persona - which allowed us to better and more in-depth grasp the nuances of the employer's expectations of the employees to be hired. We will write a little more about the technique itself and how we used it in our project in the next blog post.

This invaluable knowledge, gathered directly from practitioners, is the foundation of our future VR scenarios. Thanks to it, we have a much better understanding of the specifics of working in the railway construction industry, we know which situations to replicate, which aspects to pay special attention to, so that our virtual trainings are not only state-of-the-art, but above all authentic and as close to reality as possible.

The novelty of our approach lies precisely in this combination: state-of-the-art VR technology with deep, current industry expertise. We believe that this is the best way to create educational tools that actually respond to the needs of the labour market and effectively prepare for the profession.

The workshop with Partner was a milestone in our project. We will soon use this knowledge to design the assumptions and scenarios developed for the collection of source material!

The “Immersive Future:Rail” project is co-funded by the European Union.