Building manager confidence before day one on the floor
Amazon EU Customer Fulfilment used Virti's immersive VR platform to close the gap between classroom theory and real management practice — at scale.
Of managers felt more confident after VR training
Training scenarios: meetings, conversations, evaluations
Customer Fulfilment rolled out across European sites
We saw a huge opportunity with immersive Virtual Reality to make learning experiences more interactive and effective for our newly hired managers.— Frank Mouat, Learning Solutions Program Manager, Amazon EU
Theory prepares managers — practice makes them ready
Amazon's EU Customer Fulfilment team had strong existing training programmes for new hire managers. But no amount of classroom instruction can replicate the pressure of leading a real team meeting, delivering a performance evaluation, or navigating a difficult conversation on the warehouse floor.
The L&D team identified a clear gap: managers were stepping into leadership situations without having had a safe space to practise first.
No safe space to practise soft skills
New hire managers had to learn high-pressure conversations on the job — leading real meetings and giving real performance feedback before they felt ready.
Classroom training wasn't translating
Theory-based learning gave managers the knowledge — but not the confidence. The gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it under pressure remained.
Consistency across multiple European sites
Delivering the same quality of management training across a distributed, multi-site operation in Europe created logistical and quality-consistency challenges.
Soft skills are hard to measure
Engagement, empathy, and conversation quality are difficult to assess with traditional training methods — leaving L&D teams with little visibility into readiness before managers went live.
Immersive learning that meets Amazon's bar
Amazon's L&D team evaluated VR-based learning platforms against a demanding set of criteria: content quality, scalability, ease of deployment at their EU sites, and measurable outcomes. Virti — partnered with HTC VIVE — delivered on all of them.
Virti's platform enabled Amazon to build realistic, interactive VR scenarios replicating the exact management situations new hires would face.
VIVE Focus 3 headsets provided the reliability, battery life, and visual quality needed for multi-user, shift-based training delivery across sites.
Virti's analytics captured learner performance in each scenario, giving L&D visibility into where managers felt prepared — and where they needed more practice.
The implementation was designed from the outset as a replicable model — not a one-off pilot — with the infrastructure to expand across Amazon's wider learning estate.
Three scenarios. One consistent standard for every new manager.
Virti worked with Amazon's EU Customer Fulfilment L&D team to build a structured set of immersive VR modules targeting the soft skills most critical to new manager success. Content was delivered via HTC VIVE Focus 3 headsets across EU sites.
Leading team meetings
New managers practised running structured, engaging team meetings in VR — covering agenda setting, communication clarity, and how to hold a room — before leading real ones with their teams.
Engaging one-to-one conversations
Interactive scenarios simulated challenging one-to-one conversations — from check-ins with disengaged team members to handling conflict — giving managers a safe space to find their voice.
Performance evaluation simulations
Managers rehearsed delivering performance feedback — including difficult conversations — with AI-driven responses that adapted to how they communicated, and detailed scoring after each attempt.
Try a manager training scenario like Amazon's
Step into a VR-style soft skills scenario — the same kind Amazon used to prepare new hire managers. No account needed.
92% of managers more confident. A blueprint built to scale.
The results from Amazon EU's first VR-based soft skills training cohort were clear: managers felt measurably more confident before stepping into real leadership situations — and the L&D team had a proven, replicable model to build on.
Of new hire managers reported greater confidence after VR training
Core soft skill scenarios deployed across EU Customer Fulfilment sites
Proven blueprint ready to scale across Amazon's broader learning estate
What changed for new managers
- Safe space to rehearse high-pressure conversations
- Confident before leading their first real team meeting
- Immediate AI feedback on communication style
- Consistent preparation regardless of site location
What changed for the L&D team
- Quantifiable confidence scores before managers went live
- Consistent training quality across multiple EU sites
- A scalable content model to extend into new scenarios
- Compelling results to justify further VR investment
A proven blueprint, ready to grow
With a successful first cohort behind them, Amazon EU's Customer Fulfilment L&D team is exploring how to extend immersive VR training further — both deepening the management curriculum and widening the scope across other teams and geographies.
What's next
Amazon EU CF's Learning and Development team continues to develop training using VR, with the infrastructure and evidence base now in place to scale immersive learning across teams.
VR immersive experience boosts the confidence of newly hired managers by providing opportunities to practise leading meetings, having engaging conversations and giving performance evaluations.