The fire service as a whole has spent much time and money in search of the perfect physical abilities entrance exam. To this day the fire service is still searching..The perfect test would be an inexpensive and easily defensible. This means that is would not cost the city or department, giving the test, an arm and a leg and if a law suit did arise from this test, it could be quickly and easily defended in court. The perfect test would be made so that any and all departments across the nation use it and accept its results.
About 15 to 20 years ago about 30 to 40 % of the nation's fire departments were using the NFPA 1001 test as their physical ability entrance exam. This was the closest thing to a universal test the fire service has ever seen. Most departments have since moved away from this test and tests like it because they rely on push-ups, pull-ups and other proxy events to indicate job fitness which are extremely difficult to defend in court. Now a days most larger departments, although not all, use the “work-performance” or “job-sample” test based on firefighting tasks. Courts like this type of test because it actually simulates firefighting tasks that are performed on the job.
Now let's all be honest with each other a fire department's physical ability entrance exam should be an accurate means of separating applicants who, with training, will be able to become successful firefighters, from those who will not. In a nut shell this means that this test should be a way to take untrained candidates and predict whether training them would even make them good firefighters. The test should be based completely on job related factors and be completely equal and fair so that age, race, gender or size have no affect. A TEST THAT DOES NOT PREDICT PERFORMANCE, BASED ON PERFORMING JOB RELATED TASKS, CANNOT SELECT THE BEST CANDIDATES FOR YOUR DEPARTMENT.
Now again let's shoot with nothing but straight honesty here. The physical ability entrance exam that is given to candidates should be able to be passed by all current firefighters on the job, including all officers and chiefs. The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Criteria – the federal law on employment testing – require the employer to “show that the behavior(s) demonstrated in the selection procedure are a representative sample of the behavior(s) of the job in question...” A test that emphasizes one set of skills, yet neglects others will easily be found invalid in a court of law. A physical ability entrance exam should not test a candidate's ability to fight fire, although if a department was considering lateral highs this is an option. But as for an entrance exam it should minimize tasks that require prior skills. Simple logic dictates that if you test people on trainable skills, you will end up selecting the people who have training, not those who necessarily have the basic abilities you want.
If your company was one that hired sprinters, people that run fast, then when testing applicants you would want to know which are fast and which ones have the ability with proper training to become fast. If your company hired firefighters, people that drag and pull hose, climbs ladders, swing axes/sledge hammers, be able to lift or carry out another human being, you would want to know which applicants can do that and which ones with proper training will be able to do those things.
By testing the applicants on other things that are not job specific, you are just hoping (and in some cases wasting alot of money) that they can be trained to perform those tasks at sometime. Because someone can run a mile in so many minutes, or do so many sit ups in a minute, tells me nothing of how they can or if they even can perform basic firefighting skills (pulling hose and carrying equipment), so why there are so many cities that still use that process I am not sure.
Hopefully one day we will see the fire service use a universal job specific test for their physical ability entrance exam, but until then I guess you just roll the dice and hope not to crap out....
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