Taking Experiential Training When You Have No Experience

I've struggled with impostor syndrome for most of my life. Who was I to say I was any kind of writer when I hadn't published a bestseller? type thinking. Or how can I get behind my own marketing when I spent most of the first part of my career writing articles from a home office?

I've faked a lot, and as I've written, couldn't say I'd ever really "made it." Yet I'm a believer in learning as much as I can from people who know a lot better than I do (carefully validated and confirmed, of course).

More than learning to embrace my inner impostor, it's fairer to say I'm motivated by the emergencies I've dealt with, the disasters I've lived through (a pandemic, two hurricanes, an assortment of winter storms), and the desire to be better prepared for next time: more useful, less clueless.

I didn't know, for example, that there had been a website set up to register and assign volunteers to help with recent hurricane recovery efforts. I don't know how I missed that, other than that I don't watch local news or have a Facebook account.

So, over the last few months I've been making an effort to attend classroom training courses in emergency management. I have a few reasons for doing this:

• I'm working towards FEMA's Advanced Professional Series certificate.
• It's a good way to network with local and state emergency responders and managers.
• I'm hoping to learn by osmosis, applying others' lived experiences to my current context – and to figure out where and how best to apply the experience and talents I do have.

My first in-person course led to a second

Not long after I started working my way back through FEMA's independent study courses, I found that my state emergency management division offered in-person training through county and local emergency response and management organizations. My county was offering G191, The ICS / EOC Interface.

I felt like this was probably an easy lift. I had a fair amount of call center experience, including 30-year-old emergency dispatch experience, and it was only one day.

The course built on what I'd learned in the independent study courses. It stressed the importance of cross training and went into more detail about the multiagency coordination group (MAC), the chain and unity of command, and some of the structures that might support a complex response.

A local dispatcher I attended with encouraged me to take ICS 300 and 400, which focus on expanding and complex incidents. I wasn't sure how they might be relevant to me in my fairly low-on-the-totem-pole position, but when I found a 300 course was being offered close to me, I signed up.

As it turned out, the class wasn't so much for emergency response leadership, as it was for anyone in the incident command system. Probationary firefighters sat alongside 20-year veterans, making me feel better about the limited number of emergencies I had ever dealt with personally.

It was a really good course, though I found myself wishing for more time to work on the practical exercises, a "hazardous materials response." I can tend to process information slowly, and I felt compressed and confused by which operational periods we were supposed to be working on during each segment.

That made me I worried I was too far behind the firefighters. Not only did they have the practical experience – "muscle memory" – from responding to many hazmat calls, even if they didn't go as far as our scenario; they had also, just that past year, responded to two major events in our community: a hurricane, and wildfires.

In fact, our down times during the class featured the responders' war stories, mainly about the more recent wildfires, which had been way beyond their training. The fire department hosting the class had done so because they wanted a better sense of how to be better prepared and make better decisions next time.

Encouraged by their example, I signed up for another online course: AWR401, Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment / Stakeholder Preparedness Review (THIRA/SPR), offered by the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX).

Where the "self improvement" fell apart

In taking AWR401, I expected something built like the NDEMU independent study courses I'd already taken. In actuality, the course was a lot more complicated. Like ICS 300, the course relied on a reality-based scenario. Unlike ICS 300, I could have as much time as I needed to parse the information.

I didn't take that time. I was taking the course at work. Phone calls came in as I worked, and nearby chatter made it hard for my easily distracted, filterless brain to focus on the extremely detailed scenario(s).

The coastal "Ambreaux County" was really well fleshed out – so well that I struggled to remember key details, needed to keep referring back to various resources, and kept feeling confused regardless as I switched between conceptual and scenario material.

I couldn't choose a disaster. There was the "hazmat" exercise from ICS 300, but there was also a "hurricane" like those I'd experienced. And there were intriguing details like "Radiation monitoring equipment is outdated and no longer certified" and "Only two of three county contracted aerial search and rescue aircraft are operational due to recent utilization."

I kept wanting to combine scenarios. I've both written and read a lot of fiction. It felt like second nature to "heighten the conflict," but ultimately, was neurodivergent overwhelm at its best. Bogged down in all possible permutations and combinations, I worried about overcomplicating the exercises – "boiling the ocean," as a number of managers have warned me not to do. (It is possible that I might have a future in exercise design and implementation.)

On their own, the capability targets and current capabilities were easy enough to understand. And it was helpful to see standardized impact language, which takes the guesswork out of how to describe disaster-related challenges like "# of people affected," "# of animals requiring shelters, food, and water."

Even as I tried to stick to only relevant details, I struggled to think what capabilities might look like in my own community. In other words, as detailed as the scenario was, it still felt very abstract. I didn't feel able to extrapolate my limited experience so I could apply it to what I was reading.

I did my best. I dialed it in when I felt I could. I even told myself it was just training, and I only needed to pass the test for the certificate. Then I worried I was shooting myself in the foot by not working harder at it.

I printed a lot of the exercises and sample language. I told myself I'd get back to it later, read through and really try to absorb it because I process information better when I'm reading, highlighting, and making notes (writing, of course).

Maybe it'll be easier to do that in my graduate classes.

The tension between preparedness and chaos

What all this – the conversations with the firefighters, the overwhelmingly detailed scenarios, the many printouts – taught me was that you really can't plan for emergencies.

There is no way to foresee everything that can go wrong. New Orleanians had lived through so many hurricanes, no one believed the levees would really break. In the Carolinas, no hurricane had ever come so far inland before Helene. No one expected Sandy, or the Joplin tornado, or the Ellicott City floods to be so intense.

Similarly, no one in my ICS 300 class seemed prepared for what to expect from training – and I think that's the point. The course and exercise designers know it's not possible to prepare for everything, and the point isn't to cover all those permutations and combinations.

Instead, it's to develop that muscle memory, even just the one in your brain. The more you think about various scenarios, the more you adapt and, yes, screw up in a low-pressure environment, the better prepared you'll be for the otherwise incomprehensible.

I have more training coming up in December and February, and while I can expect my neurodivergent brain to be somewhat overwhelmed, and it may not be the practical experience I'd otherwise gain in the field, it is experience and I am learning.