The responsibilities outlined in the two prior bulletins (EMC368 and EMC369) are just that - RESPONSIBILITIES - not tasks to do personally, but through delegation to qualified unit personnel. So, let's look at that in a brief example of staff appointments.
ORGANIZATIONAL AND PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT
Assign a Personnel Manager/Recruiter to handle the management of the enlistment and call-up of personnel. They make visits to other organizations and clubs within the jurisdiction and recruit new personnel. They ensure that all required agency and organizational registration and informational documentation is completed by all personnel. They work with the Training and Resource Manager to meet Organizational personnel requirements.
Assign a Inter-Organizational Liaison to represents your organization to other organizations in order to enhance the emergency communications capability. This is accomplished by visiting other organizations both inside and outside your jurisdiction and promoting the exchange of operational information. They also can act as a conduit between the organizations agency representative, the Unit Senior Officer, and their counterparts in other organizations.
Assign carefully selected persons to a position to create a program for, and to manage unit training. These two skills - create and manage - are rarely found in the same person, hence the need for two appointments.
TRAINING
Throughout the following, you will see the importance and the necessity for reliability, dependability, performance, and knowledge of the served agency by its volunteers. There are some volunteer activities that require little or no prior knowledge of the served agency by a volunteer. This is not the case in emergency communications. Unit participants must be a part of the served agency system BEFORE the emergency strikes. Such a volunteer seeks out an agency or organization ahead of time. They then serve because they WANT TO as a part of an agency, an organization, or a system as a team player. There simply is no room for loners. The days of just sitting down to any radio, anywhere, without adequate knowledge of the served agency, are gone. Unit personnel must learn the system and the procedures; if not they will not be part of today's emergency communications unit.
Those who study human activities know that the mindset of each person controls their adaptability. For instance, consider a person who says "I've been an Amateur for over forty years. What can YOU possibly teach ME?" - a sad, but true, remark at a RACES recruiting meeting.
Training covers more than the use of equipment. Today, training covers complex systems, agency nuances, protocols and a host of other important aspects in a furiously fast-paced world of 2002; where the expectation level of agencies served is far beyond that of decades past.
Continues next week
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