Quantitative and Qualitative Confirmations

Bielsa's mistake and its link to virtual reality simulators

Part 1: The Long Road and the Validation (The Quantitative Side)

Over the past few weeks we've received two pieces of news that make us happy, because they tell us we're on the right track. The first is the result of years of hard, systematic, and persistent work. The second is a fortuitous event involving Marcelo Bielsa that validates, from a qualitative standpoint, our vision of how new generations learn.

In 2020, together with the ACHS (Chile's Occupational Safety Association), we carried out one of the first large-scale implementations of virtual reality (VR) training in Chile. We ran machine safety training for six manufacturing companies. It wasn't easy: the technology at the time was rough and the environments were highly diverse. We identified several flaws, but instead of getting discouraged, we treated every design and implementation error as a finding to improve on.

Six years of constant iteration later — developing, piloting, and testing not in the comfort of a lab, but with workers under the desert sun, in wind farms, solar plants, and mining operations — we consolidated a solid methodology. That's how our simulators have already been tested by thousands of users.

In the case of mining workers, our simulators are used throughout their entire working life:

This accumulated experience allowed us to export our solutions to Peru, Central America, the United States, Europe, and Asia (Bhutan).

But the crowning achievement came unexpectedly: an independent study by one of Chile's most prestigious universities measured the impact of our LHD and Jumbo simulators at a major mining company, recording a productivity increase of 30% and 29% respectively, and concluding that operators' age was not a barrier to use. A quantitative validation, with no commercial interests involved, that clearly confirms and validates the hard work we've done.

Part 2: Bielsa's Mistake (The Qualitative Side)

The second confirmation came from the soccer field. After Uruguay's elimination from the 2026 World Cup, Marcelo Bielsa took responsibility at his farewell press conference. In his analysis, he explained that the squad (with an average age of 28) demanded a drastic change in his working methodology. The team's complaints pointed to:

The players demanded short, concise, and dynamic analysis sessions. Bielsa, an old-school coach, had to give ground midway through and admit that the group needed "relief" and less rigidity to absorb the tactics.

What Bielsa understood too late is that we're living through a profound generational shift that affects soccer players just as much as workers in an industrial plant or a mine. These young people are digital natives: they consume information in dynamic, interactive, and direct formats. If a professional soccer player gets bored with long lectures about the very thing he's passionate about, what can we expect from a mining operator facing a three-hour technical PowerPoint? The obvious result is zero learning.

Our virtual reality solutions fit perfectly with this new generation of workers, and we see it every time we arrive at a work site: workers welcome the technology and our training with enthusiasm, because it speaks their language — the language of interaction, immersion, and gamification.

Conclusion

We're going through a major technological and industrial shift that goes hand in hand with generational changes that are becoming very evident, and that impact jobs, production, safety, and more. Meeting this challenge requires bringing knowledge and experience closer to workers, through solutions that make it easier for them to access and that have a positive impact on productivity. That's the challenge we're happy to take on at Yoy Simulators, because with these quantitative and qualitative validations, we know we're on the right path.