NETCO to Offer Virtual Reality Training for IBEW Apprentices

August 30, 2022

Recently, the National Electrical Trade Council (NETCO) was pleased to announce that they will be rolling out virtual reality (VR) based training for beginner electrical apprentices at their International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Training Centres in Ontario over the next few months.

The state of the art Virtual Electrical Training (VET) platform was developed by IVRY Technologies, a division of IDEAL Industries (Canada) Corp. NETCO has secured the rights to offer this program via their training centres in Ontario with the goal to offer it across Canada.

NETCO Executive Director Chris Swick, RSE, says the benefits of this type of training are immense and this is just the beginning. “VR training will assist electrical apprentices in getting proper training that was developed using Canadian standards, in a safe virtual environment. This type of training will eliminate any sort of risk for a new apprentice and will cut down material waste in training centres, and eventually more VR modules will be added to the curriculum” explained Swick.

“Another benefit of this type of training environment is that there is no requirement for large space and the training equipment is highly portable, so training can be done in virtually any setting. We plan to start shipping out the Oculus VR Headsets to our Ontario based IBEW training centres that are on board with this program over the next few weeks. This is a very exciting evolution in the training model in Canada and we are pleased to do this with one of our training partners, Ideal Industries (Canada) Corp.,” said Swick.

“IDEAL Industries is extremely proud to be rolling out our state-of-the-art VET (Virtual Electrical Training) platform to the Ontario market in partnership with NETCO. Our IVRY Technologies team has worked diligently to produce a learning experience like no other, providing a unique and engaging learning platform for apprentices in a safe and effective manner” says Sean Bernard, National Sales Manager for IDEAL Industries (Canada) Corp.

Delegates to the Annual NETCO conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 27, 28, 2022 will benefit from an educational session ‘Intro to VR Training’ with Sam Jaros, Business Unit Team Lead of IVRY technologies and will be able to see the product firsthand in the NETCO booth at the trade show portion of the conference. 

NETCO looks forward to announcing further initiatives in training over the next few months including new courses being added to the Online Apprentice Support Initiatives for Success (OASIS).

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