Training Thoughts in General
This week I will not have a specific topic for training but some general thoughts and attitudes that should be fostered if you are the training officer or responsible for training in your department.
These thoughts and comments are in no specific order and I believe they apply to the paid sector as well as the call and volunteer sector.
Also before I start I will offer a reminder that if you are in the northern climates, now is a good time to review your water and ice rescue training for the year.
Here is the Link to previous article on that.
Now for some thoughts:
Everyone wants to do hands on or practical training because it is exciting and interesting. Training officers enjoy doing this training. We end up doing this training and spending very little time on the academics and educational pieces. This leads to firefighters who are performing tasks and don't understand why they are even doing it. Think about it and adjust your training so there is a balance.
There is not enough risk management and assessment training going on. We are not preparing firefighters or fire officers to make a number of decisions. Firefighters are using, (or not using) standard operating procedures as a cookie cutter approach to all fires and we are not thinking on our feet. We do what we did yesterday. Make your firefighters thinking firefighters. The best firefighter is a thinking well trained moderate risk taker. Is that what your training program is providing.
Firefighter safety is not taken seriously and is a joke among training personnel. Trainers and instructors are routinely breaking rules and showing and condoning bad safety behaviors. The words are leaving our lips but they are meaningless. We talk about safety but we don't demonstrate it during drills or in some cases as we perform our job. Are you really teaching and training safety or are you just talking about it.
There should be no difference in the training that is given to a career firefighter and a volunteer or call firefighter except the length of time it takes to achieve it. We have made it a difference. The fire has not been told that yet. Same training , same objectives one just takes a longer time to deliver because of scheduling.
We tend to train on subjects we are most comfortable with. If you are not comfortable as the training officer with a particular topic then learn and study more about it, and get someone else in who is more familiar and assist them in teaching it so you will become better. Just because you may be weak in an area doesn't mean your troops do not need to know that information. Get help and improve yourself as a trainer.
Some people do not have what it takes to do this job either volunteer or paid. If you as the training officer see a deficiency in a person's ability then you have a legal and moral responsibility to report it and deal with it before that person is injured or injures someone else. We do not like to make difficult decisions and we want to give everyone a chance but often time the fire is less forgiving and understanding.
Look outside your own department for other ideas, training methods and SOPs. Look for comparable departments in size so that you are not measuring yourself against the FDNY. or Chicago. We have become too parochial in our thinking and we are not willing to accept and talk about new ideas.
There is a lot of thought provoking information in the above paragraphs. It is my intention to get you to look at yourself long and hard and to measure your training program against these benchmarks. Don't just read it and put it away, make changes and do something about it. After all as instructors we can all learn more, and we of all people know that learning is an observable behavioral change.
Read the NIOSH reports and see the same causes of firefighter deaths and injuries....and we say
we have learned from these?