It's a typical Monday morning and fire crews are arriving for another day of training at the Fresno (Calif.) Fire Department's training division. The training officer has worked with several subject-matter experts from the department and some from fire agencies in other states on the training topic that will be rolled out over the next month. She has collaborated and negotiated with private vendors to ensure that the media she will use is state of the art and will capture the attention of firefighters (i.e., sufficient video of fire and things blowing up).

She also has developed a training schedule that provides the most efficient use of class time, limiting the amount of time the crews will be away from their response districts. This might sound like a typical training officer going about her normal duties. The key difference in this case is that the training officer is a civilian who has no prior fire-service experience.

A trend has been growing in the fire service to incorporate civilians into the role of full-time fire-service trainers. The use of civilians (non-sworn, non-firefighting personnel) in support roles is not new. They have been used for administrative assistance and clerical support since the inception of the organized training division (if there is such a thing). We even have contracted with them as trainers for short-term, specialized topics such as organizational improvement or perhaps a series on leadership and management. However, a few progressive fire-service organizations have begun to use civilians to augment their cadre of full-time training officers, a role traditionally reserved solely for sworn firefighters.

The Fresno Fire Department currently provides fire protection services to the city of Fresno (the fifth largest city in California), as well as two adjacent fire-protection districts. The department operates out of 24 fire stations and protects a population of more than 550,000 with a force exceeding 330 uniformed firefighters. Until late 2006, the department staffed its training division with one training chief and two assistant training officers, fire captains who were re-assigned from the field to a two-year rotation.

For many years the department realized that the training division was terribly understaffed, that a sizable amount of mandatory training wasn't getting done and that the training that was being done was not well documented. In late 2006, the department went through some rapid growth and, helped along by several other contributing factors, the training division was able to add three assistant training officers. One was an additional sworn position (fire captain); however, the other two positions were authorized to be filled by civilians. Since then, the department has seen tremendous success from its civilian training officer concept and has become a model that other organizations are beginning to follow.

Reasons for the Trend

There are several reasons for the growing trend. In some cases it is driven by simple economics. Civilian staff members typically are less expensive than full-time firefighters — mainly because of the added costs of hiring, training, equipping and paying sworn employees. Civilian employees might be paid comparable salaries, but the balance of their benefit costs usually are less than half that of sworn employees. In light of the current economic crisis, the use of civilian training officers in some agencies has made the difference between a department's training division remaining open and still somewhat effective, or closing it down entirely.

While economics were not the initial reason for Fresno to employ civilian training officers, they became an unexpected benefit during the current budget crisis when the training division was forced to cope with a significant reduction in funding. The lower benefit costs of the civilian staff allowed them to remain in place and keep the training division open and effective. In fact, we had enough data to show that the civilian training officers more than paid for themselves in terms of reduced operating costs.

In some cases, the civilian training officer possesses special skills or credentials the average firefighter might not have or is too cost-prohibitive to provide. In Fresno's case, one of the civilian training officers is a registered nurse and serves as the department's EMS coordinator. This appears to be, by far, the most common use of civilian trainers. Although we had former firefighter/training officers with prior experience as paramedics, the background and credentials of a nurse gives the program a higher level of credibility — both within the organization and with the outside EMS agencies with which we must coordinate.

Bringing firefighters up to the mobile intensive care nurse (MICN) level of training would be incredibly expensive, with little return on the investment because of the relatively short amount of time (one to two years) they would be assigned to the training division. In contrast, the civilian training officer does not rotate back into the field every two years. This allows the institutional knowledge gained by the civilian employee to grow continuously, an advantage when compared with firefighters, who face a steep learning curve each time they rotate into the training role.

Our other civilian training officer is used as a curriculum/media specialist. This type of civilian position doesn't appear to be nearly as common as the EMS trainer, but it is growing quickly because of the need to incorporate more electronic media in an organization's training program. For example, Fresno's curriculum/media specialist has a background in curriculum development and adult learning in the private sector, including experience as a trainer for several Fortune 500 companies. This particular training officer has helped develop computer-based learning-management and records-management systems, which permit the organization to provide station-based training that allows crews to remain in service and in their first-in districts.

Because our department protects an area of almost 400 square miles, reducing the number of trips back and forth to any single training location is a huge gain in efficiency — both in terms of service levels and budget savings. In addition, we now are able to better track training hours and credentialing levels so that, when audited, the department can prove that we're doing what we say we're doing. This is a vast improvement over where we were just three years ago. Other agencies that have incorporated this type of civilian training officer include the Kern County (Calif.) Fire Department, the Clark County (Nev.) Fire Department (Nev.), the San Antonio Fire Department and the Oak Harbor (Wash.) Fire Department.