Frequent driver training is crucial for fleets looking to mitigate their driver risk and ensure their drivers keep safety top of mind. The problem is that building and maintaining effective driver training content is difficult and time-consuming, especially when you’re assigning it on an ongoing basis. Employers find themselves asking:
- How do I know my training is understood?
- How do I know if my drivers are actually completing the training?
- How do I make sure the training provided during onboarding sticks?
- How can I make training time-efficient?
- How can we further reduce our liability and protect ourselves from lawsuits?
The answer to each of these challenges lies in “mastery-based training.”
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7 Fundamentals of Effective Defensive Driving
What is Mastery-Based Training?
SambaSafety uses a mastery-based system for our online driver training courses, meaning that to complete a module, the driver trainee must demonstrate mastery of the material presented. Each lesson within our comprehensive driver training solution includes periodic quizzes and exercises that work to ensure the driver’s understanding.
How Does Mastery-Based Training Work?
Mastery-based training ensures that learners are presented with all the required material – course segments can’t be skipped or passed without presentation and demonstration of understanding. The course material builds up from basic concepts to more complex information.
As a trainee works through each course, they are presented with information segments. Most segments are followed by a short question that reinforces the main teaching point. If the trainee answers correctly, they are presented with a short overview explaining why they are correct. This emphasizes the main teaching point a third time. They can then progress to the next section of the course.
On the other hand, if they answer incorrectly, they must return to review the initial instruction segment, to then be prompted with another question that must be answered correctly.
What Are the Benefits of Mastery-Based Training?
In the fleet and transportation world, mastery-based training is an essential tool for new employee orientation, ongoing training, remedial training, and onboarding for equipment, technology and company processes.
Mastery-based training can benefit your company and reduce your overall risk by:
- emphasizing quality, impactful training content
- offering modern training methods that are time-efficient and decrease administrative burden
- focusing on specific tasks and skills, rather than broad education
- providing evidence the company trained employees on critical topics as an added layer of legal protection.
Our fleet driver training solution also protects our clients by requiring a 100% score to pass each course. This ensures that each skill or instruction is better understood and more likely to be appropriately applied in real-life situations.
Implementing Comprehensive Driver Training
Frequent, proactive training is a crucial addition to your fleet safety program. It keeps safe driving techniques top of mind and reinforces your company’s ongoing dedication to your team’s safety. It’s also a proven method to reduce crashes and violations. In fact, fleets that train monthly have almost half the violations of those that train twice per year.
Considering driver training for your fleet? The first step is easy. Download our checklist, 7 Fundamentals of Effective Defensive Driving to get started.
