Excerpts from 25newsnow.com:
Thirteen men and women started a new career in Bloomington on Monday after changes in application requirements allowed them to follow their dreams.
In October, the Bloomington Fire Department eliminated the requirement for potential hires to be paramedic-certified before joining. Instead, they will be taught through the department.
As part of this change, Bloomington’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2025 includes $210,000 for two new training officers. The department promoted two people from the floor to the training division; one focused on fire training and the other on EMS.
Four of the 13 new hires are licensed paramedics and will hit the ground sooner. Others who only have their EMT license, will take about a year-and-a-half to be fully trained, all while getting paid.
#1 by Mike on April 3, 2024 - 2:42 PM
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This is the way it used to be for many departments then they got greedy and started pushing for people to already be certified firefighters and licensed paramedics or ENT-B’s. Well that shrank the pool especially since you need to be rostered on a department to take OSFM tests. All these places talk about career development but none want to lay the foundation for someone to get into this job. This is exactly what has created the shortage of people applying. Hopefully this works out for BFD. The additional training officer positions is good too. Training revolves around everything and in 2008 after the market crash many departments were forced to cut budgets and training and training officers were the first things cut.