chutchinson

In my first post I recommended finding new training and conducting some training outside of work. Now I would like to briefly talk about some different methods of training that people may not have thought of.

To start with you must realise that not everyone will share your enthusiasm for training. I found this out for myself when I noticed other officers and supervisors attending training so that they could slack off and get paid. So how do you get people interested in training?

Simple. You make it real for them. Make them understand that training is important and can go along way towards making sure they go home at the end of their shift. The problem with this is that just telling them is not likely to inspire them to learn and pay attention.

One method I found that is highly effective is to make a list of any major incidents that have occurred at your workplace and other similar locations. In my case I created and maintain a list of major events and emergencies that have occurred in hospital’s around North America. I will never find every single incident but right now the list stands at 10 pages and includes everything from serious assaults against staff to an aircraft crashing into a hospital and active shooters on campus.

Additionally I have created a list of Hospital Police Officers that have died in the line of duty in the U.S. Whenever the anniversary of the officers death comes around I will pull the info sheet out, read the blurb and then conduct training relating to how that officer died. Whenever I teach a class I will start the last day by naming off all of those officers and detailing how they died and what family they left behind.

The end result of this? During my last training class I had several experienced officer’s approach me. Some of them had been working throughout the city alone for years and admitted that they did not wear his issued ballistic vest. Most thanked my co-instructor and I before telling us that they never truly realised that people had died while doing this same job, that they planned to wear their vest every day and that they were going to make an effort to attend more training and get more involved with teaching new officers. This surprised me as one of the officers had been shot at years ago while at work. I naturally assumed he wore his vest.

By doing more then just paying lip service to the dangers of the job my co-instructor and I managed to change the mentality of several supervisor’s. I am confident that they then went back to their sites and began sharing the information they learnt with their officers.

I often hear officers from other agencies complain that they can’t train because their department has no money. Having all the money in the world for training would be amazing but I can’t imagine the chief of a department cutting a blank cheque and saying “buy whatever you need…just make sure our officers go home safely at the end of each day”

So what can we do? Well you need to get creative with training. First identify what type of training you need. Then spend some time looking at what is available.
Disaster response? CBRNe Awareness and Basic training is free online. FEMA offers the course information to ICS for free. Alberta Emergency Management offers a free online Emergency Management class (not sure about other provinces).
Officer safety/ Tactics? Policeone.com, lawofficer.com and officer.com all offer amazing articles and some video’s created by world class subject matter experts.
First aid? Well stay tuned and MedTech will help us all on that subject.

If you look around hard enough you will find some great, free (every managers favorite word) training. As I have mentioned before both Campus safety magazine and Canadian Security magazine offer free digital editions.

Another chance for training that is often overlooked is the start of your shift. At most agencies the start of shift is really the only time you can get your teammates together and not be interrupted. How about a roll call training session? Maybe everyday one of the officers has to give a 10 minute training brief on something work related. It could be about the law, policy or a new tactic. Make sure you rotate through everybody. That way you know at least 1 person learnt something in class.

One other method that I would like to investigate more for my own agency is the possibility of training with outside agencies. Can you offer some sort of training that would be useful to the police, ems, fire department, corrections, bylaw or any other agency? If you can then maybe you can make a deal and train them in exchange for some training for your own staff. I would love to partner with a local law school and teach my officers how to give more effective court room testimony. I think a partnership with a law school would be very beneficial. You could set up a mock-court and both sides could learn all sorts of useful information.

The sky is the limit when it comes to training. Try to think outside of the box and figure out what new types of training you can come up with. When you do drop me a message, I would love to hear what anyone else is trying.

Stay Safe,

Chris