Re-training in security driving
Professional drivers undergo regular driving training. We have spoken to some senior managers who seem puzzled by this, considering the training to be little more than a boondoggle. After all, if you know how to drive, you know how to drive. What more can there be?
In fact, there can be rather a lot, and there are at least three good reasons to take recurrent training.
The first is that driving – and particularly security driving – involves a lot of complex motor skills that need refreshing. All the really cool stuff you see in the movies, where cars turn around quickly to avoid a trap, or ram through cars blocking their way, are not easy to do, and require practice and refresher practice in order to be executed effectively. Controlling cars in slippery conditions also require practice to be done effectively. It is better to have your driver practice all of these in controlled conditions, rather than relearning them while you are sitting in the back of the car.
A second is that we keep learning new things about what the bad guys are doing, and how to defeat the attacks. You want your driver to be capable of handling incidents before they occur. This is clearly better than the driver letting you die for lack of currency re-training. Or, not even being able to do that because you and they are needlessly dead.
A third reason is that technology changes. As an example, many of us learned fancy evasion maneuvers that depend on controlled skids. That is to say, when we stamp on the breaks we expect the wheels to stop turning in a predictable manner. Unfortunately – or fortunately – one is hard pressed to find a car today that that does not have some form of ABS implemented. Anti-Blocking Systems are wonderful, and have made driving much simpler for most of us, but it means that the techniques that worked for us in the past no longer work for the way in which we have been trained. Again, you have some expectation that your driver will be able to control the vehicle appropriately, and it is important to make sure that they change as technology changes.
The bottom line is that training and re-training are part of doing a professional job. While it might seem that there is not really much to do to retain driving skills, that is only true for a limited subset of the population. If you are putting your life in the hands of your driver, best make sure that you make it as easy for them to be successful as possible.
After all, if you stint on their training you may be stinting on your survival…
