Training

Having been involved in the fire industry for over 20 years now, it has become obvious to me that the level of investment in training is patchy and sometimes a bit hit and miss. From a customers point of view the professional contractor should be well trained as a significant level of trust has been placed in the competency of the company and its engineers.

Hit and Miss Training?

What I mean by the opening statement is that the most obvious training is normally achieved, which is organised by the FIA (Fire Industry Association) or the BSIA (British Security Industry Association), this normally covers the basics of the standards required to comprehend the job at hand but what it does not cover is the key technical differences that can help the engineer solve and resolve a problem accurately and quickly.

The benefits of training are obvious to most who consider these issues, it takes some evaluation of the people involved then some significant time based concerted effort to fill the gaps found.

For the customer the benefits should be;

• better advice
• quicker resolution of problems
• confidence and trust building

Most fire and security companies rely upon site based experiences, however the issue that we see with that is you will inevitably end up with gaps in the knowledge.

Our answer to this is to foster a new learning for life environment within our business and to this end we have created a dedicated training resource centre to facilitate our efforts to keep our people ahead of the game.

WFP Training resource centre

Our new training centre is on the same estate as our office and has been kitted out with a rack of control equipment, which is interchangable depending upon the product that is being learnt, the engineers can create simulated scenarios on the training panels and systems to gain an understanding of linking panels together in a school environment, the cause an effects of a system covering a larger building using the device simulation software.

We also use it to train our engineers on the finer points of PC usage, linking to the WFP server intranet by VPN connection, where we host a significant technical resource database from frequently asked questions to technical drawings of the various site scenarios that we have encountered through the years.

Customer training

For our installing customers we intend to offer product awareness course and installation techniques designed to improve the installation capability of the eletrician adding value to WFP customer proposition, should you require more information about these then please contact us directly in the office 0845 481 0307.

If the customer does not install and is looking for either product awareness or installation training we would be happy to discuss this individually and add this to our offering.

We already do site CPD style seminars for consultants and building services engineers, please speak to Greg Reeves our sales manager for more details about these.

In Summary (to answer my own question)

Yes I think that anecdotal evidence and experience shows that the consistency with training across the industry is patchy and has been a bit hit or miss, one thing that I am certain of is that once an engineer has gone through the training courses most companies don’t actually debrief the engineer and find out if it was any good or if the engineer actually learnt anything!

Paul