What Are Your Fire/Safety Training Goals and How will You Measure Success?

For example, identify and choose from your top three training gaps such as:

Pre-incident planning Size-up skills Communication skills Strategy & tactics

Critical thinking Personnel accountability ICS / deployment SOP compliance

It goes without saying to choose and prioritize goals based on how important and achievable they are, given your resources. One technique for turning a goal into an actionable plan is to think with the end in mind. Imagine you have implemented a training process that achieves the goal(s) you chose. What does that look like, and how specifically are measuring that the goal is achieved?

For example, instead of starting to develop training with the admirable but vague goal to ‘improve communication skills’, think about specific instances in which you want to improve communication, such as size-up reports, and determine how you will measure success. Then you can back into the types of exercises you will need to develop or acquire.

A simple question that should be answered foremost is WHO is being trained to perform WHAT as measured by HOW. It is worth mentioning that considering your goals and identifying how you will solve them is an iterative process, not a ‘once and done’: don’t be surprised if you discover additional training gaps once you feel you’ve got a handle on addressing your initial gaps.

Next section: II.2 What Types of Simulations Might You Consider? –>

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