Combat Vs Utility

I'm positive you do get RP EXP via whispers. 

For possible ideas, you can have professions or training halls that you pay a weekly/monthly fee for and by engaging in the activity, it progresses the bar in the related skill. For example, maybe you rent a cart sponsored by a Company and peddle common wares to imaginary NPCs. If an NPC buys something (determined by a die roll to see if they buy a few things or splurge) you progress your Mercantilism depending on the profit raked. You don't have to actually get money; in this analogy you can justify not getting bucks as covering the cost of renting the cart. Other possible ideas can be a shooting range to practice Marksmanship, constructing grenades and bullets for Two-Fry to work on your Engineering, visiting the Ironworks to learn a few tricks and rank up your Blacksmithing and/or Armoring, a gym/boxing area/training ground to practice Unarmed/Light Armor, pest cleaning to root out very wary vermin and improve your Stealth in the bargain...so on.

If there was a way to mechanically recognise players as part of a faction, you can restrict some areas by faction. For example, you can only access the shooting range if you are in the CCPD.

The important thing here is to institute a hard "cap" so players can't AFK grind all their skills to 100 in a week. For example, the tasks above only let you obtain, say, 200 EXP every, oh, 24 hours or per server reset, and/or you can only attend a maximum of X tasks this way;  for example, if the part-time job limit is two, I can't get Demolitions EXP helping Two-Fry if I've already sold goods on a cart and hit the shooting range beforehand. It still makes dungeons the ideal way to rank some skills up, but it doesn't entirely shaft the people who aren't so crawl-happy.

You can just as well apply the analogy to Engines' average dungeon crawl. Insert money (stock potions/ammo/grenades, pay the boatman), push buttons (hit mobs, chug potions, hurl grenades, reload your guns), watch numbers go up. My suggestion is aimed to give people who don't or can't always mooch a dungeon party the option to progress nonetheless, while keeping dungeon crawls relevant due to superior EXP and monetary gains, and generally being less mind-numbingly boring. As for the RP, people dropping what they are doing to engage in a grind already happens for the most part, because I doubt every PC in Calidor is intentionally a mass murdering sociopath, and no matter who you're partying with, your rationale for being in a dungeon still boils down to "remorselessly murder guys en masse and take their stuff so you can get better at remorselessly murdering guys en masse and taking their stuff" with not a thought for any long-term consequences. You'd think after the fifth raid in the asylum the surviving occupants wouldn't have two dimes left to rub together, let alone the psychological and mental trauma our characters would experience in the face of half the things they do to survive the average fight and come out on top.

When doing nonviolent training, you're not always guaranteed significant progress for the investment you put in due to die rolls. One day you may hit the cap in an hour, other days you'll burn three hours making minimal progress, but either way it's something that you can do so you can train your skills even if you missed the Wyler train. Furthermore, these jobs won't give you swanky level 40+ gear or boatloads of cash; you'll have to get those the hard way. Finally, on the RP side of things, it's easier to justify the grind behind a recurring rat problem to practice your skills on.