The “HOW” of Training Strategies and Implementation 

Many are confused or overwhelmed by the need for better/more frequent training on incident response, especially business and school leaders. 

These leaders understand their duty of care requirement to do more to protect the employees and customers on their premises, but telling them to "do better...do more training" isn't enough. This challenge is compounded by instructors using training methods that are designed for the military or first responders. 

Overwhelming the intended training audience by stressing the urgency of training requirements and bad (or at a minimum misguided) training methods isn't helping our communities develop better training standards, implementation plans, or assessments that make our communities safer! 

In a second response on this topic, I will layout the Crisis Response Leader Training's recommendations for how to get started on increasing knowledge of "HOW" to conduct safety and security training. 

 

Crisis Response Leader Training advises all leaders to look at the below recommendations, and in this order. Note: each of these could be breakout sessions for leaders and their staffs. 

 

1. What is your organization's mission and how does safety/security impact that? 

2. What are the critical assets (people, places, property) that you need to protect? 

3. What are the most LIKELY and MOST DANGEROUS threats that could impact your critical assets? 

4. Can you place a prioritized value on both Assets and Threats to determine a ranking of what you need to develop a plan for, in order of priority? Note: This is very similar to the CARVER Threat Vulnerability Assessment. 

5. Develop an Emergency Action Plan (DRAFT) (EAP) 

6. Group major responsibilities from the plan into an overarching Skills List 

7. Break the Skills List into sub-categories that involve either Leader, Team, or Individual Tasks. Note: Almost everything eventually breaks down into an Individual Task. 

8. Identify the Tasks that have to be performed to a high degree of success, each and every time, compared to tasks that can be trained upon with less frequency. Note: This is called the Proficiency Level (Trained, Partially Trained, Untrained). 

9. Identify how often each task has to be trained upon or used in order to maintain the desired Proficiency Level. Note: This is called the Frequency Requirement. 

10. Review the DRAFT EAP and modify both the Skill List and the plan so that it better matches your organization's capabilities. 

11. Develop a training strategy, including a long-term calendar, that addresses the needs of the EAP compared to your Skill List and start with a CRAWL phase, introducing the Critical Skill List topics to the organization in the first 1-2 quarters. Then, escalate training to the WALK phase (slightly increasing the complexity of the training while reaffirming the basics). And finally, conduct quarterly, semi-annual, or annual RUN phase training that test the capabilities of your personnel on various Skill List tasks compared to the EAP. 

YES, it's a daunting action list but at least it gives you a roadmap! 

CRLT can help! Contact us for an initial discussion and let's see how we can help you. 

By Tod Langley
Oct 24, 2022