Ask any teacher – or guidance counselor, for that matter. Transferable skills are one of the keys to success in work and in life in general. While there are loads of professionals from mechanical to physician learning and practicing very specific areas of their trade, an equal number of us deftly take what we have learned in another part of our lives and work on it. ‘apply successfully here. and now.

Intentionally or not, the Land Rover crew seems to understand this concept. The company offers a variety of programs to both its customers and employees in which the skills learned while driving one of their off-road platforms can be deployed in other areas of life.

Their formidable Trēk dealer training program, which we talked about recently, puts employees from all walks of life – sales, parts and service – in team building situations where skills are developed ranging from product knowledge to navigation. in the wilderness (not to mention manually winching a 2.5 ton SUV backwards up a hill).

On the customer side, their Land Rover Experience Centers offer everyday drivers the chance to develop their driving skills and discover the courage that their Land Rover truly is capable of.

Off-road experience and driving school

Land Rover knows that it can be difficult to explore the limits of a vehicle, especially when it comes with the vast capabilities of a Defender or Discovery (or, really, anything in the catalog. Land Rover). These programs aim to provide owners with the opportunity to gain additional confidence in their driving skills and experience the capabilities of the truck with steep inclines, downhills, side slopes, and water crossings.

You can bet the skills learned here are transferred directly to the frontal cortex the first time someone loses grip on a winter Canadian highway on their way to an early morning hockey practice.

Good control of the car manifests itself in multiple ways, and you can bet that having the confidence to have fine control in the wheel can have its roots in learning the intricacies of precision wheel placement on a wheel. off-road course. If a driver trusts the latter, there is an argument to be made that they have a much better chance of catching a sudden side slip on a rural road.

Your author also believes that realizing the extent of your own abilities can also have an effect on those around you. It’s certainly possible that those kids in the back, or your partner in the passenger seat, are more likely to improve their own driving skills (or at least take an interest in them) if someone else in the family devotes time and effort to building their own set of driving skills. That’s not to say that we should pass ourselves off as experts to those who don’t know better, as this approach can be fraught with pitfalls and there’s a good chance you’ll run out of talent in the middle of a job. lesson. That’s why Land Rover Experience Centers employ qualified instructors to sit by your side and give you advice like Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid movies.

Land Rover Trk

But dealership employees who find themselves on a Trēk event will end up with these types of transferable skills – plus one more yaffle. The program is designed to put teams of three in a variety of situations from off-road driving and towing to mental challenges. Learning how to properly slide an aluminum flatbed trailer back through a series of cones will come in handy the first time you need to set up camp in your new motorhome with the entire campground watching over each one. of your steering wheel movements. And if some of these new skills are taught to other Land Rover employees after the Trēk participants return to the dealership, so much the better.

Heck, even the correct dismantling of a one person tent is part of the deal. Anyone who leaves Trēk saying they haven’t learned Something it’s either telling lies or sleeping all the time.

It’s not that there is much of a chance for the latter, mind you. Between a two-kilometer hike requiring the proper use of a portable GPS device to assembling a sufficiently strong bridge on which to drive an SUV, Trēk blasts his participants for the 6 hours following the competitors on the track.

If at some point in the future one finds oneself in an all-terrain pickle requiring winch extraction, the person who attended Trēk will likely know the proper (and safe) way to use the thing. The same goes for properly using the myriad of useful driving modes buried in a Land Rover’s infotainment system.

Learn from others

Speaking of which, if you are looking for a bridge between the transfer of skills acquired by the dealer staff at Trēk and the Land Rover customer base, the why and how of these driving modes is a prime example. It’s one thing for a sales rep to just turn a dial and display eye-catching animations on the SUV’s infotainment screen; it is quite another thing for this same representative to have experimented the difference between Mud and Rock modes, then transfer that knowledge to their client – if not in a live demonstration, at least through an account of what they learned at Trēk.

This is surely one of the big advantages for Land Rover when trying to justify the Trēk and like-minded programs. Enthusiastic and knowledgeable customers are much more prone to praise the merits of a brand than owners who simply view their vehicle as just a transport device.

By engaging their dealership and their customers at this level, Land Rover has a better chance than other automakers of turning people into ambassadors rather than mere owners. Traditional marketing will not accomplish this feat as effectively.

Do events like Land Rover Experience and Trēk help attendees develop a transferable skill set that they can use elsewhere? Absoutely. But more importantly for the brand, these people are also likely to transfer (or at least talk about) their new skills to other people.