The spike in visibility of crises has most certainly resulted in changes to how organizations operate, and alongside that trend another is growing, albeit more quietly – that of training people to fill the variety of emergency and crisis management roles that are emerging.
Check out this description of one such course, from a Kansas City Star article by Mara Williams:
Any of your college classes go like this?
There is Stephanie Eiken, dangling 40 feet in the air from a rope attached to a harness strapped around her waist while she stages a mock rescue from a forest fire lookout tower.
Classmates, meanwhile, tend to people playing victims of an F5 tornado. An injured pregnant woman. A man buried under concrete. A person pierced by a metal bar. Complicating matters are burning buildings, closed roads and knocked-out bridges.
It all was part of a three-day training exercise for 50 students in Northwest Missouri State University’s new comprehensive crisis response bachelor’s degree program. Such training is becoming more common for college students as a growing number of schools nationwide offer degrees in emergency management and crisis response.
Many of today’s top emergency and crisis management pros learned on the job, but it sounds like the next generation may come equipped with skills and knowledge that used to take years of facing real action to master. We’re excited to see how they put them to use, and what new achievements they’ll be able to reach as a result!
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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Erik Bernstein is Social Media Manager for Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. and editor of Crisis Manager]