Gunskirchen, March, 2^nd 2021 – Digitalization and new ways of working have become indispensable for cross-border cooperation between different company locations, especially since last year. This was also the case at the Upper Austrian engine manufacturer BRP-Rotax, which recently faced the challenge of selecting numerous new employees. A unique virtual reality job assessment with a gamification approach was the future-oriented solution for the main plant in Gunskirchen and the plants in Querétaro and Juárez.

The innovative value of the VR solution developed together with the Tyrolean company Mediasquad was recently honored with the prestigious award of the renowned "Academy of International Extended Reality": The virtual reality job assessment by BRP-Rotax prevailed in the final main category "VR Enterprise Solution of the Year" against renowned competitors such as British Airways or the US Airforce.

Future-oriented solution combines virtual reality and gamification

The partner project between the BRP-Rotax sites in Gunskirchen, Querétaro and Juárez was intended to provide a simple way of making the best possible use of the large number of new employees on the assembly lines. The determination of retentiveness, accuracy, vitality, speed, attention, and logical thinking were the top goals. Not every applicant is equally well suited for every job, and a good fit is important, both for the employee and for the company.

The virtual reality job assessment concept, the only one of its kind in the world to date, uses an entertaining gamification approach to let employees perform individual work steps virtually, directly on the engines. In eight different games, they have to master various tasks that are evaluated in the background according to certain aspects. Skills and tasks can thus be determined and trained step by step under guidance - even if the trainer is thousands of kilometers away on another continent.

BRP-Rotax designed this pioneering virtual job assessment program together with the Innsbruck-based VR specialist Mediasquad and implemented it for the first time last year.

Innovative training and further education as a driver of corporate success

"The large number of new employees, especially at the three company locations in Mexico, presented us with a major challenge in recent years: numerous colleagues in Querétaro and Juárez had to be selected and trained as efficiently as possible, even though BRP-Rotax's expertise was primarily based in Gunskirchen, Upper Austria," explains Markus Niederwimmer, Director Global Supply Chain. "With our new virtual reality job assessment, we have found a way to successfully transfer the high-quality standards in the selection of our assembly employees across national borders into virtual space. A trendsetting project that also offers us new possibilities in the future in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. The prestigious VR Award once again confirms that we are not only innovative in our engines, but also one step ahead of many companies in the assessment of applicants, such as in the training and further education of our employees," explains Wolfgang Rapberger, GM BRP-Rotax / Representative of the Management Board.

At BRP-Rotax, training and further education have high priority: In addition to numerous other initiatives, the company founded the RIC Innovation and Research Center with its own ROTAX Academy in 2007 together with the state of Upper Austria and Oberbank. Here, however, it is not only employees who benefit from high-quality knowledge transfer in the field of digitalization and robotics. As a publicly accessible facility, the RIC also serves as an educational engine for the entire region.