Mahindra South Africa last week officially opened the doors of its new Training Centre in Gauteng.
The new centre is located in Centurion and it more than doubles the available space of its predecessor. It will be used for all internal and dealer training and will also welcome dealers and staff from other countries in the Southern African Development Community.
“With the growth of the Mahindra brand in recent years, we have completely outgrown our previous technical training facility. The new Training Centre will allow us to train more people more often. Ultimately, this renewed focus on training and skills development should reflect in even better customer service on the showroom floor,” says Rajesh Gupta, CEO of Mahindra South Africa.
The new Training Centre takes into consideration the impact of recent lockdowns and thus offers a mix of in-person and online training. The latter is made possible by modern technology that allows Mahindra’s training team to provide classroom and interactive style training to remote learners.
The Training Centre is also equipped with a dedicated workshop and a simulated sales environment that allow attendees to apply their training immediately and be tested on their skills and competence.
With its comprehensive list of training programmes, the Training Centre offers full training certification for all of its technical and inter-personal courses. All courses were developed by Mahindra’s own technical specialists, specifically for South Africa.
[From left: Sujith Nair, Head: Technical, Jolene Barun, Customer Care Manager, and Shane Henery, Technical Executive at Mahindra South Africa.]
The opening coincides with the next round of our global Tekfest technical training competition. Tekfest is Mahindra’s global competition for technical personnel and service advisors. It combines various rounds of online and in-person evaluations to select South Africa’s best technical specialists.
Technicians from all over the country compete in 18 different categories in three different specialist fields – technicians, diagnostic technicians and service advisors. The competition not only tests different levels of competency, but it pits the best of the best against those from other Mahindra countries, with the overall winners competing in the global Mahindra Tekfest competition.
“Our Mahindra technicians can certainly hold their own against their counterparts from other parts of the world. We believe that the new Training Centre will help us maintain this high level of technical competence and at the same time help train the many more sales and technical staff that are joining the Mahindra brand every month,” says Rajesh.
Mahindra last week opened its new national warehouse and parts distribution centre. It follows other new developments, including the Special Fitment Centre in Gauteng, new dealers in rural areas in South Africa and the large vehicle assembly facility in Durban, where it assembles the Pik Up for the local as well as the export market.
“South Africa is the regional hub for Mahindra and the brand’s second home outside of India. We will continue to support all levels of skill development to support the growing demand for Mahindra vehicles and the planned expansion on the continent,” says Rajesh.
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[Inspecting the new facility, from left: Sujith Nair, Head: Technical, Rajesh Gupta, CEO of Mahindra South Africa, Senthil Selvaraju, incoming new Head: Aftersales and Pratyush Bose, current Head: Aftersales.]