DriveWise wins 2026 Readers' Choice Award for driver training

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35,000 clients with a 99.9% rating. That is remarkable.   You think so?   [music]   Hello and welcome to another episode of COS TV. I'm your host Shane Mercer, senior editor of Canadian Occupational Safety. And with me today is Lesley de Repentigny, president and CEO of  DriveWise. Lesley, congratulations on winning a Canadian Occupational Safety Readers' Choice Award.   Thank you very much. Very happy to have done so.   For those who don't know, these awards

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are based on direct feedback and votes from OHS professionals across Canada. Uh what does this recognition mean to  DriveWise and your team, and how does it reinforce the values and culture that helped shape your success?   Well, I One of the pillars of our company is client service. And although we incorporate things like uh driving simulators and high technology into our learning, uh core culture is to be client-centric. And so to have clients uh vote for us means that we we're succeeding where we

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want to.   Putting the clients first makes a lot of sense.   first.   Yeah, right on. Uh what principles have influenced the way you develop and deliver safety training that resonates with the organizations and operators that you serve?   Well, we have been around for 20 This is our 22nd year. And we in when we started and only had maybe 100 clients here, we had a 99.9 client recommendation rating. And now our program service about 35,000 uh people per year, and we've maintained

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that rating. So that is uh we see that rating start to slip, and it's not a pleasant day for people to uh cuz we brainstorm immediately anytime there's even a glimpse of anything going below 99.9. So you figure out how to how do we get it back? What did what did we do for that client? It's all about the client, about meeting their needs, about targeting all our learning into their specific fleet needs. And not doing off-the-shelf training, but doing customized targeted training for each and every client.

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35,000 clients with a 99.9% rating. That is remarkable.   You think so? We work very hard to achieve it or we put a lot of effort into training our instructors. Uh for a lot of the sector that we're in in the commercial driver training, there really is no standard uh for what your instructors need to be trained at, to what level they need to be trained. But we have an intensive and extensive training program for onboarding. And then all of our instructors undergo continual retraining and mentoring. Peer

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mentoring to one another. Large group sessions to exchange best practices and what's working. And we pass that on to all our partner centers. We have over 100 partner centers to deliver training across Canada. So we're very conscious about making it a relatable human experience for our participants.   Very impressive. Um now uh  DriveWise has a uh couple of in-house technology initiatives. Uh what are they and how have they helped you respond to evolving workforce needs while advancing safety

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outcomes for clients?   Right. So the technologies that we choose to use in our programs are They serve one of two purposes. Either for the purpose of um standardizing the program when we're doing coast-to-coast training for our clients. So we use quite a bit of program management automation to be able to analyze data, analyze instructor performance, analyze how the course where is performing, tracking whatever metrics our clients will give us to see what kind of achievement we're doing for them in

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reduction or quicker on-boarding times, whatever their particular learning outcome was desired. And in our classrooms and our programs, we use driving simulators quite a bit. We built our own air brake simulation system and that so it's all about increasing learner retention and making teaching points that are not otherwise possible. I people will say they teach head-on collision avoidance, but hopefully they're not actually getting in a cab or a car and   [laughter]   playing a game of chicken with someone,

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but in a driving simulator you can allow that situation to develop and without instructor intervention, see what their actual ability to recognize danger, to recognize threat, make cognitive decisions and what their decision-making capabilities are to get themselves out of a situation. And it helps to build reflex memories for if they ever unfortunately find themselves in a situation, they'll have some training to fall back on.   Right. Yeah, that technology very helpful in those situations that nobody

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ever wants to be in.   Exactly.   Yeah. Yeah. The Readers' Choice Awards recognize vendors and suppliers whose products and services deliver meaningful value to the OHS community. How does your organization address the most pressing fleet safety challenges and what impact have you seen as a result?   Well, as I said, we do customize training. So, every fleet has a different challenge that they're experiencing, but some of the common ones are a reduction in incidents that

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they may have. Um every fleet has a different number that we look to achieve, but we're pretty confident in saying we'll get you a 20% at least reduction in your incidents that you're experiencing. And a lot of it is because of the targeted training. For example, if you take an off-the-shelf driver education or driver training program, and your incidents are all being caused because of close-quarter maneuvers, an off-the-shelf course may put 5% of its time on close-quarter

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maneuvers. With us, there's going to be a higher concentration on understanding and practicing close-quarter maneuvers both in simulator and in-cab. Uh because that's where you're going to get the best bang for your buck to reduce incidents and keep your employees safer.   Wesley, where are you going from here? What opportunities and challenges do you see ahead for professional driver education in Canada? How do you plan to build on this Readers' Choice recognition to strengthen safety,

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workforce development, and industry standards in the years to come?   There's quite a few challenges facing this industry right from we have new driver programs for, you know, your 16-year-old that's just learning how to drive all the way through commercial driver. The everyone is going to have to relearn how to drive and how they think about driving with the automation of vehicles. It's going to have to get people to be Um two of the main things that I can see already where we're getting a lot of

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demand is a thing called skill fade. Uh where there is an over-reliance on technology to solve the situation for you. And I'm out of the aerospace industry, I'm out of the military, and we saw the exact same trending I see them happening now in commercial vehicle operations and in just private motor vehicle is a thing called skill fade where people become as automation comes into the cockpit, which is now the car, there's an over-reliance on instrumentation, on pre-warnings, on

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the vehicle controlling the situation and you not being ready when automation fails, and automation does fail. And um or misreading signals that you're being given by the automation because you've become uh either complacent or over reliant on the feedback from it. So, I think that's going to be a huge challenge in the future moving forward, not just with new drivers, but with older drivers relearning how they think about driving and making sure they don't forget how to steer and avoid, how to do

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proper space management, that they're able to fall back on a skill set, uh especially being in Canada where our weather is going to cause more automotive uh automation headaches than [laughter] than the maybe California or somewhere else. They don't have a lot of snow. So, I think that's a huge um thing that moving forward. Uh also for our trucking sector of our company, there's uh an aging workforce that needs replacing, and where are those people coming from? And how do you onboard them safely and

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take into account all this automation that's coming forward as well as our particularly difficult uh driving environment that we have in Canada due to uh climate.   Yeah, as somebody who recently got a new vehicle, I know exactly what you mean with the automation. It takes a lot of getting used to. It's a strange kind of thing when the vehicle wants to take over when it's on cruise control as opposed to just, you know, uh controlling the speed, but it actually wants to take control of the of

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the steering wheel, and you know, it's uh it is kind of weird, right?   Yeah. Yeah, you're not used to when you want to go give a cyclist a little more room that your car is fighting you for   [laughter]   for doing that. I'm I know I'm kind of veering close to the yellow, but I'm trying to you know, so there's going to take a little bit for um the automation to adapt, but also for humans to adapt. And I hope we don't follow the same trends that happened in aerospace where there

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was quite a lag and I quite a few skill fade issues and they solved it by mandating certain amount of training per year specifically designed for skill fade to make sure that pilot can still land, take off by themselves, recognize equipment failures and react to them quickly.   All right. Well,  DriveWise is here to help the humans adapt to the technology.   Technology is built by humans as well, at least so far. You're just changing where the error may have may occur in the drive, right?

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Right. Exactly. Well, Lesley, this has been great. Lesley de Repentigny, president and CEO of  DriveWise. Thank you, Lesley, for coming on the show.   Thank you very much for having me.   And thank you all for tuning in to another episode of CO AS TV. Stay up-to-date on the latest news and trends in safety by regularly checking in on us at the safetymag.com. I'm Shane Mercer. Till next time, stay safe.   [music]