A lot of the time people think we just respond to incidents but we do a lot of work around
prevention and what we call protection as well. You've got Prevention - so all the work
we try and do to stop people having incidents and then you've got Protection - which is around
making sure businesses within our communities are safe. I've been in the fire service about
18 years, before that I was a teacher. There are so many different
roles within the fire service so you've got the operational
career pathway so from operational firefighter you can then move up through to become
supervisory managers and then senior managers but then you can choose to specialise so protection
team you have to be highly skilled and highly trained to be able to do that area of work.
Fire and rescue services invest a lot in training and ongoing development for people in that
area of the business. In another area the prevention
team obviously there's training and development in that
because you need to understand how other agencies work, how other agencies support people when
how we can work with those agencies to make them as safe as possible from fire. I think
a lot of people see that Fire and Rescue services are
advertising and just don't think that A. they could do it
or B. they've never even considered doing it. The job is all about helping people so if you've
got a drive to really help people, whether that is in
a response and an emergency situation, which we will train
you for, or whether that's in the prevention world where you're trying to stop those incidents
happen first place. We're professional problem solvers we need people who can look at a
problem and find a way to sort it out to fix it - from driving a fire appliance to putting
out fire, there's a whole host of things that we'll develop you
in. A firefighter ultimately is about helping
the public, saving people, animals and serving the community.
It's, to be honest, the best job in the world I absolutely love it, it's just a wide range
of everything really from working really closely with your other
colleagues to obviously preserving the community, teaching children in school about fires, visiting
vulnerable people in their homes to help them with
home by safety and just educating the community on what we do and what we're
there to provide. I've been to a lot of incidents
over the last 17 years I've been doing this job and seeing
somebody be rescued and OK and reassuring them, I think that's a highlight for me and also this
job or this career was something I really, really wanted
from the age of about 15 so just still being here now and
loving my job that's a big highlight for me. When I was at high school we did the Duke of
Edinburgh award, we were sent to our local fire station
which is Stratford fire station to do a course and from that first night shift that I went there
learning about community and what the fire brigade
do I knew this was what I wanted to do. I did 13 weeks in
training school back in 2005 and it covers everything that we would do in this job role from
all the practical side of firefighting, dealing with
road traffic collisions, trauma and first aid training, working
at height - as obviously we work at heights a lot, animal rescues, also a lot of community
work - how we talk to children in schools about the schools programme,
using the equipment so the hoses, the ladders, the pumps, operating the pump so that's
all the basics in the first few weeks we start with all
the equipment side of it and work up to the VA week and then if you pass each section
as you go along then you obviously continue with the
course. In this sort of job role, if you're going to go for it,
for me, I did work on my fitness I went to the gym and I ran and I did lots of weight
training because I didn't want to be starting the process and
then having any sort of personal issues with my strength
or something like that. It is all about technique it's not just about how strong you are if
you can get through the 13 week training course and you
can pass all the tests that they require then you'll be in
and you'll be fine and once you're in it's the best thing ever.
I would 100% say to anyone young person male or female that if they are considering joining
the fire service to 100% go for it, it's literally the
best career ever I love coming into work. If you're prepared
to put a little bit of effort in yourself and training yourself with the fitness and
you enjoy meeting people, helping people, working hard then I
would 100% go for it it's a brilliant career. Joining the service as an on call firefighter
I was sent to training school for 12 weeks down in
Devon which was an absolutely brilliant opportunity. Once I'd become a competent firefighter in
the service I was then eligible to go for promotion
into a crew manager role from there you know you can go
from a firefighter potentially all the way up to Chief Fire Officer but within the service
there are certain roles and ranks that we have to fill before
we get there. Some people are quite happy being a career
firefighter and the service definitely needs that but there are certain individuals that
want to progress and you know I've been fully supportive with
that progression. I think stereotypes have been a bit of
a blocker for the fire service for a long time, we need to breakdown that barrier so
this is why we're going to have the 'have a go' day, so we get people through the
door that wouldn't ordinarily come through the door
and say - look, this is what the expectations are and we were happy to guide you through that
process. We want to develop the right people because they might have the right skills and
attributes that we need within the fire service but they've
never considered it as a career choice before.
I think any young person should consider it as a career going forward no matter what background
they are from they should definitely not rule it out, if they aspire then they can potentially achieve it. We've got fire cadet programmes and things
like that so they can join up quite early and go through
their stages and gain a really good understanding of the
equipment we use within the fire service. The first thing we do when we get onto station
is we'll parade at 7:30, we'll do a roll call to make
sure we've got the right crew members with the right skills.
So once that's been completed we do what we call the daily checks so that's to make sure
the fire engine and all the safety equipment like breathing
apparatus sets are all safe and meet the correct standards for us to use, they've got the
right amount of air in the cylinders and then from there we
would normally do some drilling so that would involve potentially ladders and pump so we've
got some really long ladders in the fire service.
When we turnout to incident we've got bells and a matrix
board that tells us what the incident is. First of all we get on the fire engine we put our
fire kit on jump on the fire engine and then I'll detail
my crew with what the incident is and where we're going
and the driver will then continue put his blue lights on and it can be quite serious
sometimes and crews are trained really well for those for
those moments and that's where your training really kicks
in and it starts to become just automatic - what we're doing, how we're doing it, how to use the
equipment safely, what safety measures we need to have
in place. The recruitment process includes various different
aspects where we'll look at we'll have online tests
for situational judgement tests, a behavioural questionnaire, we'll look at fire
and rescue service ability tests but one of the key parts
of the recruitment process is in the interview. The role
related test is important but the interview test is really important as well because that will
be the opportunity for people to talk to us and sell
themselves and tell us about them as a person. So we're
interested to know how people engage with colleagues, how they work as a team, how they
embrace diversity, how they are able to serve the community.
We really want to encourage people from minority groups into Fire and Rescue service and
we want to create a taster day where people can
attend and have conversations and ask questions about concerns they may have and I think these
taster days are a great opportunity to do that. The main ways it is being advertised is via a
website, there are loads of links on there about you know the role
itself, there is a candidate information pack that tells everybody
about the role, what we're looking for, the actual role related test, the process and what
they can expect over the coming weeks and months. We're
also advertising via social media so you'll see
a lot of adverts currently going out via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and all the
details and the links are on there.