It's a win-win: their coaches are gaining experience, new skills and qualifications while helping to guide and inspire people...

West Midlands Fire Service’s role has changed markedly in recent years and that’s placed new demands on its workforce. Through the West Midlands Coaching and Mentoring Pool, it’s enabling staff to rise to the challenge.

In a fast-paced organisation where the nature of your work involves life and death decisions on a daily basis, there’s a risk that workforce development will become sidelined.

West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) helps keep the region’s 2.9 million residents safe and in 2020-21 it responded to more than 45,000 calls and attended in excess of 25,000 incidents.

But that’s just part of the picture. England’s second largest fire and rescue service has seen its role evolve over the last 20 years and it’s now at the vanguard of the prevention agenda.

For example, during the same period its staff carried out 18,422 Safe & Well visits to protect vulnerable people at home and provided fire and road safety education in hundreds of schools and colleges.

All of which bring new challenges for its 1,900 operational and support staff.

Despite the hefty workload – heightened during the pandemic response – WMFS places strong emphasis on supporting firefighters and non-operational staff in their personal development. Over the last three years, coaching has become an increasingly important part of the organisation’s learning and development offer.

WMFS is a member of West Midlands Coaching and Mentoring Pool, run by West Midlands Employers. Kerry Evans, the fire service’s Learning and Development coordinator, says it has opened the door to an invaluable two-way relationship in terms of developing their own coaches and accessing external coaches from a wide range of organisations.

WMFS also has a growing pool of internal coaches – trained by WME – who are paired with more junior staff using the Pool’s Matching Hub.

“The training programme for new firefighters is really hard and very demanding. Some have come to us, perhaps because they haven’t passed the first assessment, and our internal coaches have worked with them to help get them up to that level. Often they feel overwhelmed and need a bit of confidence building – the coaches are able to support them to break down their development areas into more manageable chunks, and to identify and reduce their anxiety levels and raise their confidence in themselves.”

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