A New Generation

We are at a strange place in the fire service. We are juggling 4 generations, 2 of which most likely never had a truly laborious job prior to making the choice to join the fire service. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it simply makes the generational shift more difficult for the late generation Baby Boomers and Gen X groups to navigate. The Boomers and Gen-Xers were very similar in the way we were brought up: Independent and fearless. Generally, we started working laborious jobs pretty young in life. A lot of us had grandparents who had farms, and we spent a lot of time working there, usually for nothing but an ‘atta-boy’. Others mowed the neighborhood lawns. Some even woke up at 5am to deliver newspapers via bicycle. All that helped most of us make the choice to work the hard jobs a fairly easy one, if not completely normal.

Myself, I worked a few different, very physically demanding beverage delivery-type jobs for almost a decade before deciding on the Fire Service. After years of him trying, it took one of my best friends to finally convince me that the fire service was the way to go. I finally listened in 2001, just before 911. I applied for our local college-run fire academy in early 2001. Due to the waiting list at the time, I didn’t get in until August 2002. In fact, the day of the academy entrance physical fitness test, I drove my beer delivery truck to the training field after running 3/4 of my delivery route, took the combat challenge, and went back to finish my delivery route. With exception of a few, almost all of my fire academy brothers left their full time jobs to persue their dreams of becoming a firefighter.

As members of the Boomer and Gen-X groups, our challenge lies in learning just how we teach 2 latest generations of firefighters and up-and-coming firefighters. How do we teach them that there is value to what will, at times, be some of the hardest physical work they will ever do in their lives? How do we teach them that dinner time is family time when some will likely have been raised by social media? How do we teach them that this will be the best decision-to join the fire service-they have ever made, but there will most definitely be challenges along the way.

To be honest, we will probably have as much to learn from them as they will learn from us. The ways in which we learned from our predecessors will most likely not work for them, and we have to adjust accordingly. As the teaching generation, the late Boomer generation and the Gen-X folks like myself need to do our best to let go of the old mindset of “do it this way because I said so”, and work to adopt the mindset of allowing these new generations of firefighters learn their own way, so long as its safe. In other words, judge the result and not the process.

That doesn’t mean these new firefighters get to blaze their own path completely. It just means we need to give them a little freedom when it comes to figuring out their way to accomplish required tasks. If it is in fact a circumstance where it’s a “do it like I said to do it”, we need to learn to at least explain why. You never know, we may learn a better way as well…

Stay safe, Randy