The Difference Between Training and Education of Firefighters

By David C. Denniston, ESIP

Have you ever done something the same way for so long that you have no idea why you do it that way? For some tasks, that is called a conditioned response, and can be a good thing. Take for example when your pager alerts. Many people will stop what they are doing and start heading for the door, to the car or towards the apparatus before a single word is transmitted. We have all heard the pager trip so many times that our body knows that if it is not noon or 17:50 (or whatever time your daily pager test is) that chances are high someone in our community needs our help and we must spring into action.

Many instructors mistakenly feel that if the result is what we want, the logic is not important.

Most likely, no one ever taught us to respond in that manner. We trained ourselves to react like that. While conditioned responses can be good, they can also lead to complacency and, worse yet, a lack of understanding of why we do what we do. You probably have heard the expression “Give a person a fish and they will eat for a day, teach a person to fish and they will eat for a lifetime.” I would like to take that concept a step further: Teach a person why and how we fish, and they can feed a community.

In the fire service, most departments do a decent job of training. We get the equipment out, use it over and over, and hope that it becomes second nature to our firefighters. This type of training is how we become proficient at what we do. The question to ask yourself is do your members understand why they do what they do?

At a recent training, I watched a firefighter do a near-perfect hydrant connection. She pulled the LDH off the back of the engine and threw it over her shoulder. She then grabbed the hydrant bag with the other hand and advanced the line towards the hydrant. When she got there, she wrapped the hose around the base of the hydrant and signaled for the driver to start laying the line. She then removed the steamer cap, threaded on the Storz connector, unwrapped the LDH and connected it. Next, she removed one of the two blind caps and threaded on a hydrant gate, radioed the driver and let them know she was ready to send water. She did all of that in remarkable time. At that point, I questioned her as to why she chose the blind cap she did. I had always been taught to point the gate towards the fire so that if another line was needed, it was heading in that direction. I was not trying to find fault in what she did and thought there may be a new school of thought out there. After all, it’s been many years since I had been through probie school myself. Her answers, however, concerned me.

“We always put it on the left side of the hydrant,” she said. I asked why that was. “Because that is how we were trained,” she said. I next asked what the hydrant gate was used for. Her blank expression confirmed my worst fear. “I really have no idea,” was her sheepish answer. This exchange was no reflection on this bright firefighter. We, as a system, had failed her. We failed to teach her and her fellow recruits the “why” and only concentrated on the “how.” Many instructors mistakenly feel that if the result is what we want, the logic is not important.

The question to ask yourself is do your members understand why they do what they do?

I fear that many of us have forgotten the word “education” in the important process of education and training of our firefighters. The training is the “what” and “how” of things we do. In the example, this firefighter had the training down solid. She never missed a beat and could not have done the process any more efficiently. She got the water to the fire. What more could we ask for, right? If we never needed the hydrant gate, like the 99.9% of the time we don’t, no one would know the difference.

The education component is the “why” we do what we do, and, more importantly, the logic behind the process. The problem with only doing repetitive training is that it does not prepare our students for the challenging times when something does not go as planned. It does not empower them to deviate from a process when necessary. Education is an important part of the training process that cannot be overlooked, but often falls short of what is needed.

The problem with only doing repetitive training is that it does not prepare our students for the challenging times when something does not go as planned.

One of the challenges is that most instructors will not be an expert in every topic that they need to cover for their department. As instructors, we need to understand this is normal and not a weakness. A good instructor will realize this and figure out how to fill in the gaps with additional resources. There are many sources available for us to fill in the gaps. All we need to do is understand them.

Webinars and online training programs became a huge component of our training programs during the pandemic. It provided a tool for us to use when precautions kept us from getting everyone together. These types of classes focus on the necessary education behind the topics. Several people have commented to me that “webinars and online classes will never take the place of good face-to-face training”. To be honest, I could not agree more with that statement. Internet-based classes will never fill the need for quality, repetitive, local training.

What they will provide, however, is an excellent source of obtaining the education component that is missing from so many local offerings. Instead of finding reasons to dismiss these powerful platforms, we should be embracing them and using them to complement what we are doing locally. These platforms allow us to bring national-level instructors into our firehouses and members’ living rooms at a fraction of the cost of bringing that level of talent to our towns or sending our members to distant outside training.

By working together with these powerful resources, we can guarantee that our members receive both the knowledge and the skillsets to keep them efficient and safe. Use these webinars and online platforms for education and then supplement them with your local hands-on training to turn the concepts into actions. Feel free to reach out to me at ddenniston@mcneilandcompany.com if you would like more ideas of how this can benefit your organization.