Wow, you are getting promoted. After several years of honing your skills and becoming comfortable in your position, you decided to add another dimension to your career, getting promoted.

You mapped out your study strategy. You worked hard to learn as much as you can about the officer’s roles and responsibilities. You also studied the aspects and components of the testing process. Because of your hard work and diligent effort – you made it. You are going to become a fire officer/supervisor.

Now what?

You realize that you now have different roles and responsibilities. You will be challenged and have challenges. However, there are many rewards that go along with moving up in the organization. Along with financial improvement, you have a sense of accomplishment, and you are proud to be a fire department officer.
You are now the leader, and your new crew will expect you to lead. Sure, you want to sound good on the radio, but the fire officer’s job is more than that. You are now part of the organization’s management team. You are the Chief’s designee in the fire station. Your responsibilities will include training your crew, making decisions that will affect the daily lives of your crew while on duty, incident mitigation, personnel challenges, report writing, evaluating team members, communicating effectively, making presentations, planning, organizing, conducting tactical surveys, fire prevention inspections, motivating your team members, and more in order to get the organization’s work done and fulfill the requirements of the mission.

SCENARIO:
You are a newly appointed Captain of an engine company. You also have a squad assigned to you. Your engineer is a 22 year veteran who has a reputation of being competent, but, is somewhat of a loner. The two engine firefighters have been on about 10 years each. One is a highly motivated and has taken every promotional exam he is eligible for. The other is a fun guy, but, comes to work so he can rest for his off duty activities. Both of the squad firefighters are young and have been on about 5 years. They are competent and enthusiastic; however, their experience is limited.

Describe your crew orientation “PEP’ talk and what considerations you have taken into account. Let us know your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under FD Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.