Posted By Richard Norwood Is it right to think that the definition of a competant person is someone with sufficient training, experience, theoretical knowledge, etc, etc.... All that said..here is my pitch... Having left employment as a wholetime firefighter in 2003 I have now transferred to Retained with full time employment in a health & safety role with a construction company. Anyway....after years of relaxed record keeping the brigade has jumped on the "Lets go over the top" competance based training. Its called IPDS (integrated personal development system) and according to some brigade websites, "allows the individual to steer their career where ever they want to go". I have just taken 6 months leave from the retained service and returned to an array of what they call "critical risk training". The content of this training was decided following a interview which they call a "Training needs analysis". This I agree with.......however, for years people including myself would be seconded to office jobs within the brigade only to return 3 years later and be thrown into a fire with BA set on the first day back. Now you'd think that this "Training needs analysis" would be extremily tough with drills, exercises and exams. Not likely....I discovered it was a nicey nicey chit chat whilst an officer ticked boxes following partically poor answers from myself. No tests on equipment, no drills just a quick questionaiire. Once back on duty you are issued with a training booklet called the "Personnal development record" which you are responsible for filling in and keeping up to date with essential fire fighter topics like "create effective communications with fellow workers"....."manage your time effectively". you then write a story in the book about how you acheived these so called competencies. Your story is taken as gospel and recorded as sufficeint training. Where is the security in that? We cant work from ladders at all now unless we do a ladder course......even if there's a casualty hanging out the window with flames licking around them. I am dissapointed and embarrased for a service like the brigade to have had to adopt a sub-standard training system like this. They have even set up an IPDS compliance team to check our books....In my opinion a poor deployment of resources for a poor system. The first hint of a accident and you can guarantee that the training book will go mysteriously missing. For a service who has three quarters of its work force off at any one time...they could come up with something better than this.