Soft driving

If learning soft skills will create as much tension as learning to drive a car does, the training efficiency (information retention and skills acquisition) will be on a completely different level.

What I came to realize from my position as a pupil in a driving school, as compared with other learning contexts (soft skills training):

Attention is paramount

It requires your full and constant attention. While learning to drive, your focus really must be at its peak. All the information (junction priority rules, traffic signals, road signs and so on) acquired previously must be integrated and applied instantly and constantly. What an amazing challenge!

Age matters

Most of the people that enrol in driving schools are teenagers, 18 years old (in Romania) or even younger (16 years, in SUA), so most of them are still in school and their brains are very used to acquiring new knowledge.

After 30 years (my case), I think we unfortunately rarely learn something that’s new and complex. And I mean really learn something new, not doing something hard and / or with low difficulty. For example, going to the gym, or go for a run, is hard training but with low difficulty. It involves a lot of perseverance and hard work, but the brain is not too stretched. Doing a difficult task at work that requires a new and particular skill (for example, how to use pivot tables in excel for a report) is a bit new, but also very contextual. These might be hard and a bit new but not complex learning contexts, as the driving school.

Motivation plays with the mind

If at the beginning the motivation is ‘yay, I am learning something new’ or ‘yay, I am actually moving the car based on MY moves’ (a friend of mine told me that this is the feeling of power that drivers usually have), later on that drive will turn into a strong aversion motivation like ‘I’ll do anything to finish this’.

Also, there is the end result, the goal motivation, that has a real impact in doing in learning: the driving license, the small, little card that can really open the world for you: independence, traveling, helping others etc.

Responsibility has an important stake

It is not just about you, but also about the safety of the persons sitting next to you in the car, the pedestrians, the other drivers.

After a driving session I had an acute feeling of an immense danger that was waiting for me right at the next turn and I though to myself: Why am I learning such a dangerous thing?

It is never perfect

Every learner has his own particular style of driving while respecting the same rules and regulations.

And even though you will be practicing years and years there will always be a risk of not doing it right, or you may be the victim of someone else’s wrong doing.

I consider all the above factors important in learning complex skills and we can go in more depth and see what is there that we can use in soft skills training.

But also, now that my thoughts are written down and put in some order, I remain with an open question: What can the driving schools also learn from different learning contexts? Is it or was it ever updated to match the adult learning needs and characteristics?

PS: I have not yet heard one story about getting the driving license that was easy. On the contrary, it is a truly told and re-told story for the person and for the others. Also, in Romania, the examination procedure is one of the dominant plots in the driving schools stories…but I am not quite there yet :-) So many were and their stories are so rich…

It will be interesting to collect these stories somehow and see how they relate to the success or failure (getting / not getting the driving license), to the person’s self esteem, to the person’s identity.