Training Is Too Important To Be Treated as a Luxury
features
The Editor’s Opinion Page
If a man convinced a corporation that he could improve its production by 5 percent, top management wouldn’t let him out the door before they signed a contract with him.
In the fire service, that man is the training officer. The quality of a fire department’s “production”, on the fireground is a direct reflection of the quality of training in that department. However, when it is necessary to shrink the budget, too frequently fingers walk through the budget items until they reach “training and education,” and there they stop like they had found a home.
Too often, training is treated like an orphan who should consider himself lucky to be allowed to sit at the table and eat the leftovers. Training is invisible to the public and usually is conducted by one or two persons, so it is easy to cut without arousing any loud complaints.
When the budget ax hacks first at the training budget, it is the same as a manufacturer starting an economy binge by cutting orders for raw materials. In a factory, that would be the first step to bankruptcy. In a fire department, it is the first step to more injuries, higher fire losses and eventually public disenchantment with the quality of fire service.
Training is a necessity that is too important to be treated as a luxury. It makes no sense that a municipality will spend millions of dollars on salaries and refuse to appropriate a fraction of a percent of that money to improve the quality of service that those salaries provide. Why is it that volunteer fire departments will stress the need for money to buy equipment and forget to emphasize that a portion of that money can be used to provide improved fire protection through training?
Frankly, if training is to get its proper share of the budget, training officers have to make a convincing case for training in reporting to their chiefs. In turn, chiefs have to relay these compelling reasons to the minicipal administrators. It’s the reasonable way to go. You can document how training has reduced the time from arrival of the first engine on the fireground to the first application of water. You can put your finger on the training that teaches fire fighters how to make the best use of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that a large factory has spent on automatic sprinklers and special extinguishing systems. You can count the hours of salvage training that can be translated into dollars saved on the fireground.
Most important of all, you can total up the number of injuries to members of “the most hazardous occupation” that have been prevented through training. You can count the number of holes in floors and roofs that caused no injury because fire fighters had been trained to enter buildings safely. You can list the walls or floors that collapsed without injuring fire fighters because they learned to detect the warnings of imminent collapse.
If your training budget is cut, maybe you haven’t presented enough cold facts and talked in terms of the commodity municipal administrators best understand—money. If they don’t understand the moral obligation for training, they will understand the financial cost of a lack of training in terms of injuries and sometimes deaths.
Training doesn’t need friends half as much as it needs fighters who will battle for it.
