Posted: 11/18/2009 2:08:12 PM EDT
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Just finished my Fire Officer II classes, the last one was Instructor II. Luckily I was able to recycle my Instructor I presentation, since when I went through 6 years ago we had to actually had to make our own. A little fine tuning and tweaking and it was GTG. This is the completion of a process that started in '94 when I took Tactics & Strategy I. By the reaction I got from the senior guys you would have thought I'd called the Pope a pederast when I told then I was going to an officer level class with less than a month on.  Of course, they were ignorant of the fact that I'd registered through my VFD and the Base had agreed I could go, long before I changed shops. A few diversions along the way, finally buckling down and applying nose to grindstone at the regional academy since January and here I am, with much thanks to our Fire Fund for picking up the tuition, my VFD Chief for providing the necessary signatures where needed (since my F/T chief wouldn't) , and my brothers here for putting up with my occasional ramblings.   Next stop - Fire & Arson Investigation, then Inspector - if they ever can finalize the curriculum.  |
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Congrats! I finished my Fire Officer 1 and 2 last April and found it very rewarding! My only problem is none of the senior guys on my dept have taken either one and quite honestly they don't know anything about that level of certification either. Kinda hard to explain it to them when one of the captins says "I'm already a captin why should I take a class telling me how to be a captin?" Slowly but surely they will all come around.... At least we hope so right?
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Quoted: I know exactly how you feel. Part of the reason there's no requirement for the certs in our shop is because most of the officers don't have them, and several of the senior ones probably couldn't hack the coursework. And of course the City won't require it, because then they'd have to pay for it, or at least allow us to go on duty <shudder>...
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Quoted: Hell our state can't even put a FF2 curiculm together. It'd be nice if we smoke eaters had a POST equivalent that we could carry state to state. Right now it's all permissive test challenges based on the whim of the State Fire Marshal / Authorizing Agency. IL OSFM won't recognize Fed/.MIL certs, even though we've got a half dozen federal installations in our borders. 
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Quoted:
Quoted:
I know exactly how you feel. Part of the reason there's no requirement for the certs in our shop is because most of the officers don't have them, and several of the senior ones probably couldn't hack the coursework. And of course the City won't require it, because then they'd have to pay for it, or at least allow us to go on duty <shudder>... It's together... I just think it sucks. I think we are trying to host one late winter/early spring. Now for us in NE to get Fire Officer 1 and whatever else through the state..... good luck. |