Higher Education: The Benefits of National Certification

Do you remember when you were young? Many of us started out dreaming about our fire service careers long before we got on our first volunteer department or received the call from the career department offering us the job. If you don’t like to think of yourself as a dreamer, how about a visionary? When you pictured yourself riding on the Big Red Truck, aka BRT (everyone knows we need more acronyms, right?), screaming down the street, lights and sirens to “save the day,” you probably weren’t thinking:

·      What if the dream job calls and says they are not accepting your state-level certification, only applicants who hold an International Fire Service Accreditation Congress (IFSAC) or National Board on Fire Service Professional Qualifications (Pro Board) certification?

·       What if, in five years, your spouse gets a job offer out of state that can’t be refused? The area combination departments are looking for part-time firefighters, but only if you hold an IFSAC or Pro Board certification.

·       What if a friend calls with a great opportunity to work for him as a government contractor, making good money, but it requires applicants be IFSAC- or Pro Board-certified?

·       What will you do when you retire and move out of state? You start looking at second career opportunities as a training officer or something involving fire service leadership roles, but all the job postings require IFSAC or Pro Board certification.

Most of us focus on the present and don’t ask these “what if”-type questions until a situation impacts us personally. Then we can’t believe our 25 years of training, education and experience gets us a free ticket back to the Basic Firefighter I Recruit Academy, that is, if we want to continue to live our dream of serving and helping others in the greatest profession on earth.

For me (Chief Shubert), just getting started as a young firefighter getting my state certifications, I gave no thought to national certification. After spending countless hours obtaining my goal of being a state-certified firefighter, my opportunities changed, which relocated me out of state. I had my portfolio organized with my state certifications ready to hand in to the full-time career department to which I was applying. I was thinking that these certifications would increase my chances of getting hired, but I quickly discovered that my existing certifications where no good in the state to which I had relocated. This was a huge setback.

I eventually got hired and ended up taking the entire set of classes and tests again. Not only did I put in double the time, but also the expense of this experience. As I look back today as a retired chief, the cost was not just to me but to the fire service as well. You never know where your opportunities may take you. As a young firefighter—or even after you have been in the fire service for some time—think ahead and be informed before you put in countless hours of training and studying for local-level certifications. Look for agencies that can provide you both state- and national-level certifications. 

As our trade transitions to a profession, department leadership must set policies, and unions must develop contracts that include language supporting the portability of our training and education for the benefit of the next generation. Think about the system you want your children to enter if they choose to follow in your footsteps. 

Here’s another thought that we should label a myth or perhaps “The Chief’s Fear”: Increased portability of certification will make it easier for members to leave the department. False. In accepting national certification, you will gain more qualified members than you may lose. If a firefighter family is relocating, difficulty in getting reciprocity in their new state will not stop them from moving; it only slows them down and causes more headaches and run around than necessary.

Accreditation and certification

Let’s do a quick review of what it means to be accredited and certified. First, agencies are accredited and individuals are certified. Certification is the formal recognition by a testing agency that an individual has demonstrated competency to a particular professional qualification standard. 

IFSAC (ifsac.org) and Pro Board (theproboard.org) are third-party peer-review organizations that review all aspects of an agency’s certification system, including fairness, security, validity and correlation to the NFPA’s national standards. If an agency meets the standard, they are accredited and can certify individuals who have successfully completed an evaluation of their knowledge and skills. 

Both accrediting organizations have been around for three to four decades and have an established presence across the country. These organizations have accredited hundreds of agencies, and those agencies have awarded thousands of certifications to qualified individuals.

As an example of their impact, according to the Pro Board, approximately 400,000 certifications have been awarded to Department of Defense personnel. And as of 2017, IFSAC had issued approximately 630,000 seals to our military personnel. We, as a fire service, should be honoring these certifications held by our returning veterans who are transitioning back to civilian fire service jobs. We should recognize their national Pro Board or IFSAC certifications as equivalent and not require these new hires (who have served our country) to repeat their training to receive a local or state certification.

What would it take for leadership (the Authority Having Jurisdiction) to amend their fire department’s policies to allow for this? For example, if your department requires members to be certified, your policy may read something like this: “All members shall become certified at the State level.” What if leadership simply added two words to the policy: “All members shall become certified at the State or National level.” This change would take a few administrative hours of work but save the department’s training budget significantly. If the new hire did not have to repeat their original training, they can go right on the line. 

What if you are concerned about whether they kept up on their knowledge and skills? Skills degradation is a real concern in our profession. Just because you were certified 10 years ago doesn’t mean you can still do the job today. This question becomes important in states that don’t require recertification and certifications don’t have an expiration date, requiring the individual to prove competency after an extended period of time. If this is the case, a Challenge Exam might be an appealing option to you.

Challenge Exams

A Challenge Exam is for individuals who have already been trained to a given level but were not certified. The Challenge Exam gives these trained individuals the opportunity to obtain a national credential through proving their competence by passing an assessment(s). Maybe the agency from which you were trained was not accredited or maybe it did not have approval for that given level at the time you were evaluated. The Challenge Exam program allows individuals to provide proof of training in order to challenge the examinations (written, skills or both) to be recognized as meeting the job performance requirements of a given position (e.g., Firefighter I certification). Of course, the individual has to provide documentation of meeting any prerequisite requirements prior to being awarded certification (e.g., Hazardous Materials Operations prerequisite for Firefighter I).

The IFSI offers a Firefighter I Challenge Exam and Skills Assessment (fsi.illinois.edu). Over a two-day period, students are required to complete a two-part evaluation that includes a written exam as well as multiple skill stations. 

Challenge Exam Evaluation:

·       Written portion: 100 questions (one attempt to pass)

·       Skills portion: 19 hands-on skills (12 mandatory, plus 7 randomly chosen). Skills meet NFPA 1001: Job Performance Requirements. Some evolutions involve live-fire evolutions. Students are given two attempts at each skill.

Upon successful completion of the process, national certification is awarded to the student, and their name is entered in the IFSAC and Pro Board registry.

Challenge Exams allow our experienced professionals an alternative to repeating training and education programs, with benefits and savings to both to the individual and the department. The individual doesn’t have to give another 7 weeks of their life to prove they can still do the job; instead, it’s one weekend. The department doesn’t have to pay for travel, lodging, backfill or overtime to have this individual repeat the 7-week course they already completed in another state.

For example, consider the Firefighter I certification in Illinois:

Firefighter I Academy

Duration: 7 weeks

Fee: $4,100

Firefighter I Challenge Exam and Skills Assessment

Duration: 2 days

Fee: $300

A profession

We attended a presentation from Dr. Denis Onieal titled, “The Leadership Challenge: Professional Development,” where he talked about the transformation that is necessary for the fire service to fully become a “profession.” One item he highlighted was the need to evaluate an individual’s ability to do the job and the need for an outside system to assure to the public of the competency of first responders. Sound familiar? Pro Board and IFSAC can help guide us down this path.

What will tomorrow bring for you, your family or your career? None of us know. Regardless if certification is not currently required in your state, or if your department’s culture doesn’t currently value certification, be a leader and pursue excellence! Professionalism will eventually take hold, industry-wide. Whatever your rank or positon, take initiative to help this profession that we love move closer to this goal.

Sidebar: Mission Statements

IFSAC and Pro Board are both are focused on helping the fire service through the accreditation of those entities that administer standardized written and/or skills examinations of the required job performance requirements to meet nationally recognized professional qualification standards.

IFSAC’s Mission: To provide and administer a high-quality, internationally recognized, standards-based accrediting program in order to enhance and increase professionalism within fire and emergency services.

Pro Board’s Mission: The purpose of the Pro Board is to establish an internationally recognized means of acknowledging professional achievement in the fire service and related fields.