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Permalink Reply by Todd on August 26, 2007 at 12:18am

As the training officer for the volunteer side of a combination department I find that my biggest challenge is balancing the needs of my more experienced personnel with the newbies. It's a delicate balancing act when you try to make a lesson plan that doesn't go over the heads of your newer guys that doesn't put your experienced guys to sleep. To combat this I use my experienced guys as assistants as much as I can. Experience is the best training officer there is, so don't be afraid to use what you got. I have one guy with close to 20 years experience, and a former chief officer at another dept in a rural area. He's also a contractor so he's our building construction guru. One of my engineers is the Asst. Chief at an industrial brigade. When we train on foam operations he's my go-to guy. My Captain works facilities maintenance for the local school district. He's our HVAC expert.

Prior training officers in my dept tended to stick more towards classroom type training. My belief is the more hands on you do the better, and even the old hands prefer getting dirty over sitting around listening to someone talk. We are lucky in that our County training facility is close by, so we have a drill tower, drafting location, and driving course close by. Being the county seat we also have several large county building parking lots available. One is less than a block from the station and has hydrants located where we can drop lines and flow lots and lots of water. The state Dept of Motor Vehicles is right next door so we have access to their driving course after hours. The biggest limitation that we have at times is availability of equipment due to it being out of service.