Training your emergency notification or incident management staff?

Tell, Teach, Involve

Training and Learning Techniques for Emergency Notification and Incident Notification Personnel

“Tell me and I forget, teach me, and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ― Benjamin Franklin

How do you train your team?

One of the key activities that an emergency notification or incident notification manager must handle is the training of their staff and volunteers. I would suggest the following process:

 
1. Create a timeline for training your team, who will be trained, to do what and when?
2. Define what the training is to accomplish. What will the trained staff member be able to do?
3. How will the training be delivered? Where and how will the team get the content?
4. How will you know they learned the content?  What tools will you use to determine how well your team can handle an incident?
5. What will you do to remind and reinforce the training you have given your team? Will they still remember how to do the tasks they should perform in a few weeks or months?

You can use a Gantt chart, Excel spreadsheet, or even a MS Word document  to describe what you want your team to do and when. You can have a general breakdown of the tasks and resources in this document.

The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) team will be able to send our predefined messages for critical incident, with no errors, to the required stakeholders and affected communities by August 30, 2014.

2.       What will the training accomplish?

Breakdown as specifically as you can what the trainees can do.

The trained EOC team will be able to:

• Identify an incident that requires emergency notifications to be sent out
• Select the message template for the correct incident type and enter the required information
• Review the settings to be sure the correct message is sent to the correct recipients using the available modes (SMS, email, phone, etc.)
• Monitor the confirmation rate to be sure the stakeholders get the message
• Monitor the resending of the message to stakeholders who have not confirmed

We’ll continue our review of the learning and training process next week.