I subscribe to a newsletter called Lessons From Learning Leaders which I find to often have some good nuggets of information. An article they released a couple weeks ago was titled “Attendance is not Readiness”. Of course the term readiness drew me in because of emergency management, though the context of usage in this had nothing to do directly with emergency management. It’s about the general ability of a learner to apply what they have learned. So much of this article resonated with me that I had re-read it several times. The subtitle of the piece is “The right training still fails at the wrong time”.
Of all the things I do professionally, I’m a trainer at heart. I had started thirty years ago as a health and safety instructor for the American Red Cross. Twenty years ago, I completed FEMA’s (now retired) Master Trainer Program. Not only have I instructed hundreds of classes across emergency management for thousands of participants, I have directly trained and qualified dozens of instructors in a variety of courses. I’ve also custom designed dozens of courses to meet a variety of needs for audiences across the nation.
Despite the title of the article having nothing to do directly with emergency management, I still related it to my experiences and observations in training – as a student, an instructor, and an instructional designer. The main point the author makes is that the course can be great, the instructor can be great, the students can be great, but if the timing is wrong, you are likely to fail to connect with the audience. The topic of the training needs to be relevant to audience at the time when they need it. In the more controlled environment of a corporation, this challenge can be minimized in many cases. But in emergency management, that’s a much bigger challenge.
As most of you who have been reading my articles for a while know, I have a strong opinion about incident command system (ICS) training – it sucks! I’m a big proponent of ICS, but the current structure of the training is pedagogically (an academic term largely reflecting on the philosophy and practice of instruction and instructional design) wrong. Check out that series of articles I wrote for more info if you aren’t familiar. After reading ‘Attendance is not Readiness’, though, this makes me consider another challenge that we face in emergency management training like ICS – timing. As the author states, “Adults learn better when the need feels real. Not theoretical. Not ‘you may need this someday’. Real. They need some reason to believe, ‘I need this now’ or at least, ‘I’m about to need this soon.”
That perspective, though, generally runs counter to so much of the preparedness training we do. If we can’t ground the training well enough in a defined, timely need, we fail to connect the information well enough with the learner. It’s kind of the same reason why some graduate programs require students to have a bit of experience in the ‘real world’ before they apply. Context. Absent context and timely application, we know that knowledge transfer is impacted, and any knowledge gained will degrade over time if it’s not applied and practiced.
It’s great that we want to provide knowledge through the training we do, but will enough of that knowledge be retained to make a difference if/when they actually need to apply it? If, for example, someone does exercise design as part of their job, taking the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) course is important. If they are currently doing the work or know they will be soon, they are more likely to pay better attention to the instruction and they will have better motivation to learn because of direct application. Something like an ICS course, on the other hand, has much less of that. Sure, information from lower-level ICS courses can and should be applied to most incidents, so this can be helpful if the learner has a frequency of response. The higher lever courses, such as ICS 300 and 400, however, are likely to connect much less since the learner not only doesn’t have context for application, but they don’t know when they would apply it. Quoting the author of article again “A lot of training is delivered when the organization is ready to check a box, not when the learner is ready to use the skill.”
I think many of us are aware of people, maybe even ourselves, who take training because it’s required of them, but they have never had need to apply it. Misinformed bureaucratic requirements aside, is ‘just in case’ a good enough reason? Training costs time, money, and effort; and, as all of this post indicates, the value of unapplied learning diminishes greatly.
I’m not sure there is a definitive solution for how to meet knowledge gaps and training needs while also addressing the matter of timeliness and context. Just in time training can help with some one of that, but just in time training isn’t intended to create proficiency in bigger concepts – it’s best used for very focused tasks. We obviously need to train certain people in certain topics ‘just in case’, since we don’t know when a need for application will arise. Is there a way we can better connect the subject matter with learners?
What are your thoughts?
© 2026 Tim Riecker, CEDP
The Contrarian Emergency Manager 