Back to the basics: My experience updating a fire department training program
A realization about advanced training skills leads to a renewed focus on fundamentals
Over the past year, I have had the unique opportunity to evaluate our department training program – in reality, not only evaluate it, but also change it, tweak it, and implement new ideas and topics.
This has been an interesting and enlightening process for me. As firefighters, we are often our own worst enemies – our harshest critic. Even when we are doing a good well, we feel like we can do better. And this certainly applies to this project. If I am being honest, I am not satisfied with what has been accomplished so far. Call it self-criticism or maybe I am just hard to please. Either way, I am trying to learn from what my gut is telling me and the mistakes I have made along the way.
But before we get into the lessons learned, let’s go back to where it started.