As part of its mission, the National Incident Management System Integration Center will be looking to improve the quality of NIMS training.

“We're not going to deliver the training ourselves,” said NIC Acting Director Marko Bourne. “The National Fire Academy, the Emergency Management Institute, the Center for Domestic Preparedness and others are actually going to be the delivery mechanism for training. What we're going to do is set the parameters under which that training is developed and the doctrine that should be put into it and then make sure that the training is available.”

State training institutions also will play an important role, he said. “The goal here is to use all of the existing training mechanisms that are out there, whether they be state fire systems, state police systems or EMS training systems. They're the mechanisms we want to use to get out the training, because they're the ones training these folks every single day.”

The NIMS staff is working with NFA and EMI to modify incident command curricula to comply with NIMS; later the NIMS-compliant curricula will be handed off to state training centers.

“If you look at the NIMS document,” Bourne said, “most anyone who has been in fire and emergency services for any length of time is going to recognize that it is incident command, the way it's taught now. But there are some new things, and so the curriculum is being adjusted to take care of those things that might be a little bit different in the NIMS than what might be out there, or things that aren't in the existing incident command courses that need to be.”