Just wrapped up the final version of my Technical Skills Training Lab proposal for junior engineers, estimators, and field superintendents — and it came with a curveball halfway through: cut $10,000 from the budget.
The original $60K version was built around Cornerstone OnDemand, Articulate 360, and H5P, with 24 workstations running six cohorts a year. When the budget dropped to $50K, the easy move would’ve been to gut the AR/VR piece I’d proposed separately and call it a day. Instead, I cut workstation count from 24 to 18, trimmed Articulate licensing from five seats to two, and used what was left to keep one AR/VR component alive: VR-based arc-flash and high-voltage hazard training. That one stayed because the research backing it is strong — a recent meta-analysis found VR training beats traditional methods across behavior, skill, and experience outcomes, and that’s exactly the kind of high-consequence training where a mistake in the field costs a lot more than a mistake in a headset.
The mobile AR overlay and multi-user VR walkthroughs are shelved for now — future phase, pending how this first VR rollout performs.
If you’ve had to make a similar call between cutting AR/VR entirely or keeping one piece alive, I’d genuinely like to hear how you decided what to protect. The good this about this lab is that it is expandable and can accommodate the additional desk and AR/VR equipment in the future.
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