Sherman FD taking training back in their own hands
by Lauren Kula
No one knows your department better than you, so why place your training in someone else’s hands? Gregg Loyd, Division Chief of Training for Sherman Fire Department, wondered the same thing.
“We have five stations spread over a 29-square-mile service area, so it’s very difficult to assemble all those people in one spot at one time to conduct training,” Loyd said. “Doing so pulls everyone out of their response area and it obviously takes time and fuel. With the increased amount of training that’s required of us, it’s becoming a financial burden to get that done.”
Loyd said the Sherman Fire Department’s training demands have increased due to the expansion of their fire and EMS duties to cover rescue, which has its own set of training standards and requirements. “With the expansion of duties and the new training requirements, it’s difficult to meet those requirements and still cover our emergency responses.”
Before he discovered the Iluminar Learning Management System (ILMS), Loyd said he outsourced the certification training required by the city and the Texas Commission on Fire Protection to an online-based training company. However, he still had to send his firefighters to a centralized location for parts of the training and skills check-offs before they could take the state’s certification exams for each discipline. “We spent quite a bit of money in overtime and travel just getting the skills and the state testing done,” Loyd commented. “It was expensive stuff.”
He had to come up with a solution to meet the new training needs without sacrificing their quick emergency response time to the people of Sherman, TX. For him, it was Action Training Systems computer-based training (CBT) courses.
“It’s been a huge savings for us,” Loyd said. “We let the firefighters and medics take the courses at their specific station when they have time to do it. After going through the coursework in the computer-based scenarios, they have the knowledge and we’re all speaking the same language. Before, we had to do two or three hours worth of training, an hour and a half of which is just the instruction, before we could ever get to the practical part.”
“Because Action Training Systems courses are NFPA-based, we can meet the Commission’s requirements for certification courses, enabling us to get approved as a training facility and complete all of those certification courses in house,” he said.
How did the students handle it?
“They love the training courses, but it was a little bit of a transition for them,” Loyd said. “The thing I like about the ILMS software platform is it gives me some control not only over content, but over testing and how the course is taken by the student. I can disable that fast-forward button so they’ll have to watch everything and can’t just skate through a course.”
“That met a little skepticism at first… but in the end, when we sent our first batch, they all got certified and we had a 98% pass rate. Now, no more complaints and they’re all signing up.”
Loyd purchased the Firefighter I & II, Driver/Operator, Aerial and Vehicle Extrication courses over an 18-month period. He said they paid for themselves within the first 9 months. With their local network installation of Action Training Systems courses, Loyd has certified people more efficiently than ever before at his department.
“I couldn’t get approved for these certification classes unless these courses were based on NFPA standards,” Loyd said. “It is amazing how many products out there aren’t based on NFPA standards. To be honest, there are lots of people who have computer-based and online stuff, but the content is where ATS excels.”
For more information on the Sherman Fire Department, visit their website at:
http://www.cityofsherman.org/fire_dept.asp
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