Reference no: EM133386446
Recruitment and retention, a serious concern for public safety organizations and the administrators who run them. One important issue discussed in this week's readings, mental fitness, will be expanded on in next week's readings about the mental health of public safety professionals.
Complete all the materials below (read, watch, listen to, etc.) Note: In this order.
This is a nineteen-page 2020 report from the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health. The article discusses mental readiness of individuals interested in becoming public safety professionals. Specifically, the authors look at mental characteristics that are most necessary to have for an individual interested in public safety. The article also looks at mental characteristics that should be considered to make an individual unfit for public safety occupations. Much of the information presented is from the perspective of public safety professionals who were surveyed. The authors recount the opinions of the those surveyed and either confirm or refute their assertions based on data gathered for the study.
Culture Clash
In this short article published in the National Fire Protection Association Journal in 2020, Angelo Verzoni summarizes the National Volunteer Fire Council's Volunteer Retention Research Report. The recruitment and retention of volunteers is, as the author states, critically important to public safety in the United States as two thirds of firefighters are volunteers.
4 reasons you shouldn't become a firefighter
Pursuing a firefighting career with misguided motives will make for an unhappy career choice. This short 2020 article by Steve Prziborowski on the Fire Chief site is interest and relates not only to recruitment and retention but also to the current literature suggesting detrimental effects of unrealistic expectations on mental health in the public safety field. This article is a valuable read for non-firefighters as well in that it provides information that's relatable to other disciplines and also provides non-firefighters with a closer look at that public safety discipline.
Faceless heroes: A content analysis of determinants for the recruitment, career development & retention of Emergency Medical Dispatchers in the United States of America
The seven-page study from 2021 looks at recent trends in Emergency Medical Dispatcher retention and recruitment. The study adds to our understanding of retention in public safety in general, compliments our understanding of the history of EMS and emergency dispatch, and introduces us to information about mental health issues in public safety-our next topic of discussion. Students may find that the discussions concerning the study's methodology, analysis and findings add little to their understanding and so decide to only skim those sections.
PDF - Law Enforcement recruitment and retention: Bests practices from the field
This is an eight-page chapter of the 2019 Justice Department's Law Enforcement Best Practices: Lessons Learned from the Field. This section provides thirteen best practice for recruiting law enforcement personnel. As with many other discipline-specific public safety publications, many of the principles in this document are transferable to other public safety disciplines.
Considering what you've learned from our readings this week and what you've experienced in the public safety field, discuss the following:
What factors are most important to an individual considering entering a public safety discipline and why?
As an administrator, what factors are most important to you concerning the prospective employees and why?
Considering our reading about individuals being mentally fit for a job in public safety, what do you imagine it is that a public safety organization should be doing to ensure that they are hiring only those individuals who are mentally fit for the job.
Given the often-contentious relationship between employees and Human Resources, how do you imagine efforts to weed out mentally unfit candidates would be received by current employees?
What efforts would you argue go too far in that they are potentially discriminatory?