Training practitioners without practice experience: can virtual learning offer an alternative?

With a decline in traditional work placements supporting academic programmes developing skills and competencies for front-line practitioners, effective new forms of learning are needed to best replicate ‘real world’ experience. Here our focus is on the niche area of housing inspection training for environmental health professionals in the UK, but the lessons arising from this have far greater applicability. The challenges of such training go beyond the traditional classroom in real time: the rapid development of virtual learning during the Covid -19 epidemic, combined with austerity measures within public sector organisations that traditionally supported work placements, have created new opportunities. The situation has become particularly acute both for recruiting new staff, but also to retain existing and experienced staff. Our parallel research also considers what the wider workforce gaps are and how these might be filled going forward. The challenges are multiple and complex, both in numbers of people needed in the profession, but also the quality of their training, its affordability to public sector training budgets, the manner in which it might be both offered and the learning assessed. This paper reviews work taken to date to develop 360 photospheres in supporting synchronous and asynchronous virtual learning to help support learning needs that require multiple, complex areas of knowledge, skills and application. We present our developments to date and discuss the journey still ahead in creating a viable resource capable of substantial impact and wider applicability in supporting the training needs of front- line environmental health practitioners.