Fireground CEO Dave Hitchcock shares his Accellier story

I’ve been trying to catch Dave Hitchcock, CEO of Fireground Leadership and Training for a chat for a while now. If he’s not running Firefighter Training in Africa he’s busy coordinating many Incident Management, Planning, Leadership and Training programs his organisation runs all over Australia and a number of international locations. He’s also busy with the EMERG Group developing the future of Emergency, Bushfire & Incident Management to include a range of Aviation, Emergency Management and Land Management operations.

We finally sat down for a wide ranging conversation about great trainers, and how Accellier helped Fireground with a range of quality learning solutions over the years.

As a Registered Training Organisation (RTO), Fireground sought Accellier’s services to train their staff in the Certificate IV in Training and Assessment. I wanted to capture the conversation and share it because I feel that Fireground and the EMERG Group are a good representation of many of our business clients that we work with.

How we helped Fireground Leadership and Training

Like all great RTOs, Fireground is built with great trainers – “they’re the hub of the wheel” as Dave puts it in the video. To recruit and retain great trainers an RTO needs to find people who are both industry leaders and amazing educators. They also need to have a TAE40116 Certificate IV in Training and Assessment to meet the requirements of the Standards for RTOs 2015.

As Fireground found great people, we worked with them to develop a program of learning that was flexible and incorporated a large portion of on-the-job learning, supported and guided by our team along with online learning and face-to-face meetings.

Fireground is big on compliance, and maintaining and updating qualifications of their team. They engaged us to help their staff with upgrading the old TAE40110 qualifications to the new TAE40116 version. We met with their team face-to-face and worked individually to determine the most effective pathway to achieve the qualification, based on the individuals needs, situation and experience.

Focussing on People

I noticed that Dave mentioned a few times during our conversation the importance of working with an organisation that maintains real human connections between the businesses and one that actually listens. In the business-to-business world I feel that sometimes the “human-to-human” can get lost.

The Accellier team strives to listen to and learn from our clients. We recognise that their world changes rapidly and we need to grow and adapt with them. We can’t do that without regular contact and sharing and reporting information about course success with business managers.

What really occurred to me during our conversation was the value of building lasting relationships with our clients. We learn so much from the business-to-business relationships we build and this allows us to offer a better, smarter, more adaptive service to all new business and corporate customers who choose Accellier to train their people.

How can we help your organisation?

If you’re interested in working with Accellier to train your staff, start a conversation now.