07 - Community Relations

Community Relations is the seventh and closing title in Action Training Systems' Fire Officer I series, supplied in South Africa by SkillsTrain, the authorised ATS distributor. The closing Fire Officer I title turns the officer's attention outward, to the public the department serves: public education, representing the service in the community, and the everyday interactions that shape how a department is seen.

It rounds out a pathway that began with leading the crew from within, moving the officer's focus from the team to the community around it.

Like the rest of the ATS range, the title uses an interactive teach, test and track model: it does not only quiz a learner, it teaches, and when an answer is wrong the course stops, backs up and replays the material before letting them move on. ATS puts the average length of its interactive courses at about an hour. It sits in ATS's Officer Development range and is built to NFPA (the National Fire Protection Association) standard 1020, which ATS names explicitly for its Fire Officer I content.

Within the same seven-title Fire Officer I series, SkillsTrain also supplies Leading Your Team, Maximizing Team Performance, Communications, Managing Conflict, Incident Leadership and Team Health & Safety, so a department can source the whole pathway from one supplier.

As the authorised ATS distributor in South Africa, SkillsTrain supplies it as an interactive online video course and on USB, individually or as part of the complete series, so South African services can buy ATS content locally rather than importing it directly. Who it is for: fire officers representing their department publicly alongside their internal leadership role.