Too Much?/Too Little?

I wanted to know how much training everyone thinks a department should have over a year,month,or week. I would like to hear how your departments set up trainings and if you think its working.

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Permalink Reply by Robert A Collins on February 17, 2012 at 7:48pm

In my department we train every Wednesday for 3 hours. Usually we have things planned well in advanced. We base training off the time of year and the resources we have available. Alot of the winter days are based EMS drills and Rescue drills that we can do in house. Recently we've done winter evolution on a snowmobile trail with a snowmobile rescue sled one of our members made. I think the stigma of you can never have enough training also fits for this. The other thing that we do is hold a day drill once every 2 weeks for people who can't make the night drill on Wednesdays. We encourage training to the max but we also stress that family comes first.

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Permalink Reply by Drew Swink on February 21, 2012 at 12:25am

Dustin- Good topic!

I am on a volunteer dept in TN. We require 20 hours of training per 6 months and 15 call points(hours). So, obviously 40 a year and 30 call. That is required to stay on the dept, if you do not reach this you may be subject to disciplinary actions, even termination. We train more than that though. We have training every Monday night and Saturday mornings, which is broken into 3 battalions throughout thr county. For instance in 6 months I had 179 training hours. We offer a wide variety of training both inside the dept but we also host a training weekend every fall for the Upper Cumberland area.