Human Skills for Human Resources

Great theory. Not enough practice.

Maddy came to academia knowing exactly what HR work looks like from the inside. She had delivered redundancies, managed grievances, advised directors, and sat across the table from people who were angry, frightened, or about to lose their income. Most of her students had never done any of that.

Not to say they were incompetent. Not at all. They could tell you the theory. They knew employment law, negotiation frameworks, models of conflict resolution. What they struggled with was walking into a room with someone in crisis and handling it with confidence and composure.

Maddy used in-class, in-person simulations drawn from her own case history: cultural conflicts, perceived bullying, difficult managers. It worked up to a point. Then COVID happened, the room emptied out, and running those simulation exercises over Zoom was just not working.

A safe place to get it wrong

In 2022, two years into COVID, Maddy was looking for a way to give students the immersive, scenario practice that Zoom could not replicate. That’s when she found Bodyswaps. She applied for internal funding, bought new VR headsets, got the software, and started building.

Students choose how they use Bodyswaps. VR headsets are available, but so are laptops, Macs, and phones. They can try and redo scenarios as many times as they want. For Maddy’s students, especially the cohort of working professionals on a part-time Master’s programme, that flexibility matters.

Maddy describes how the Bodyswaps team made the setup easier than expected: workshops, setup assistance, and human support at every turn. 

How Bodyswaps is used in HR training

Bodyswaps sits at the core of Maddy’s master’s Employee Relations module and has since moved into a second Master’s class. Maddy creates learner pathways using a mixture of scaffolded learning modules combined with customised AI roleplays. The AI roleplay feature has allowed her to build her own scenarios drawn directly from 20 years of real HR cases.

Four years of evidence 

Every HR professional cohort since 2022 has given the Employee Relations module a 100% satisfaction score. That is not a lucky result from a single group – it has held across four years and multiple cohorts.

Alongside the satisfaction data, Maddy tracks how students rate their own confidence before and after each module, which technology they chose to use, and how their written reflections develop over the 12 weeks. That data feeds directly into her academic publishing.

Pass rate: 82% → 89%  

Mean mark: 55% → 64.11%  

Student satisfaction: 100% every year

The impact of Bodyswaps has extended well beyond its original implementation within Liverpool Business School. The platform is now being used by LJMU's Employability Team to support students in developing confidence and competence through immersive, AI-powered interview simulations. Its adoption by Linda Graham, Careers and Employability Consultant demonstrates the scalability of the approach and its contribution to enhancing student confidence, communication capabilities, and employability outcomes across multiple disciplines.

In addition, Joshi Jariwala, Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management, has independently adopted Bodyswaps within the undergraduate HR programme, further embedding the technology across the student learning journey. What began as a single internal funding application has evolved into a cross-disciplinary initiative that now operates across several layers of the curriculum, supporting students from undergraduate study through to postgraduate and employability-focused provision. This organic expansion demonstrates both the sustainability of the innovation and its wider institutional impact.

Experiential learning is unforgettable

Maddy’s view on this is simple, and comes from two decades of doing the job before she started teaching it. You cannot prepare someone for a difficult conversation by getting them to read about it. They have to experience it. They have to get it wrong, figure out what went wrong, and try again.

Bodyswaps gives students the chance to do that in private. By the time they sit across from a Bramhalls lawyer, they have already failed safely. And that changes how they experience the in-person, real-world conversation.

Maddy is already writing the next scenarios. Disciplinaries. Grievances. Tribunal preparation. The situations HR professionals dread most and meet most often – and almost never practise before they have to do them for real.

Her students still get surprised by the job. They just get surprised in her classroom first, where it’s safe to learn from your mistakes.