Virtual Reality-Enabled Workforce Pathway

Pandemic Inspires Creative Training Experiences for Summer Youth Programs

For several years, CVRF has been building a workforce development pathway leading to employment in the maritime sector, beginning with Youth to Work. Before the pandemic, much of this pathway relied on travel-based experiences. For example, youth would travel to Seattle to visit the Northern Hawk at port, to Dutch Harbor to see our fishery efforts in action, and top vocational schools like the Alaska Vocational Technical Center (AVTEC) in Seward and the Seattle Maritime Academy. All travel ground to a halt when the pandemic hit our region. We put the Ciuneq program and our Marine Basic Training partnership with AVTEC on hold. We suspended the Dutch Harbor visits that we’d previously offered through our internship program.

To help fill the void left by these important programs, we invested in a partnership with Designori, an Alaska-based company that creates training experiences in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In 2020, they helped us create a digital replica of the factory on the Northern Hawk and turn it into an operational training environment. We plan to deploy this training into our summer youth programming in 2023, giving youth the opportunity to explore our largest vessel without ever having to travel out of their community. And as the pandemic has receded, we’ve begun exploring how to re-introduce some of our travelbased programming to work in concert with this emerging VR content.