The client
The New Zealand Fire Service is comprised of five different regions with over 400 stations and more than 9,000 firefighters spread throughout the country. The nature of the emergencies NZFS attends are as varied as the people who call for help. New Zealanders rely on NZFS staff being professionally prepared and capable to respond whenever they are called upon. That makes training critical to the NZFS doing its job.

The challenge
As a Government Training Establishment (GTE), NZFS sets and maintains minimum trainer qualifications and competencies. As an integral part of bringing greater professionalism to training, the Education Services team undertook to review existing trainer qualifications. That process included the need to develop a trainer progression model that provided a straightforward, clear model for how training staff would progressively develop skills over time, given their particular roles and responsibilities.

Completing this work would bring multiple benefits:

• A common vision across the organisation of the skills required of trainers
• Clear pathways for staff to plan for development, building their motivation and commitment
• A clear model was needed as a basis to review existing qualifications, and resolve the most effective model for delivery.

However NZFS also knew it was easy to overcomplicate these processes. At the end of the day, what was needed was a practical, simple model that staff could easily engage with and set manageable goals.

Synapsys was engaged to both define the process, and support the wider NZFS community in developing the model and the implementation plan that would be needed to make it a reality.
 

The solution
Our starting point was getting the process right. Who needed to be involved, and how? The next step was to develop and agree on the templates for the founding documents that mapped out the vision. In our experience, it’s a real trap to try and get ‘everything’ into the progression model. Matrices of knowledge, skills, attitudes, levels, families and so on can quickly become so large and unwieldy that they are promptly ignored.

The test for the templates was whether operational staff could pick them up, make sense of them as they related to their job, and know what to do with them.

The templates became the discipline behind the data gathering and analysis that then took place. Multiple roles were grouped together, and three simple levels developed. Brief descriptors of what those people could do were distilled down to the basics. When the model felt right, the next step was to develop an implementation plan that laid out the actions that would be taken to put it in place.

For us, the key was to be clear about our role. While we had experience to offer, the success of the model would depend on how widely it was accepted across the organisation. That was our facilitation role; stimulating debate and taking the time necessary to unpick the myriad of complex issues that are typical for such projects. And that’s the part we enjoyed the most.

The benefit
The progression model now informs trainer development, both for the staff themselves, and by the NZFS in ensuring the best possible training provision. The signed-off progression model became the basis for an RFP, under which the most capable providers were selected for implementing the new vision for trainer development.

Perhaps more importantly, the conversations we had during the process now mean that there is a shared vision across the organisation of what skills are needed, and how staff will go about developing them.
 

The reference
Mitzi Austin, Manager, Education Services
"Synapsys played a vital role in helping us to clarify and shape our thinking to get an effective trainer development framework agreed and implemented. Phil’s external perspective, facilitation skills and high-level strategic understandingwere key to the success of this process. While the model is deceptively simple – now- the organisational buy-in needed was the critical aspect and Phil was masterful in leading us through this."