Education (by Discipline) for Fire Protection Pros

One thing I hear as soon as I introduce my role as "Fire Protection Engineer", all the time, is "wow you're a rare bird."

Not sure if it's a compliment or not. 

To be fair they don't always say "bird", sometime's it's "duck" or "unique" or "oddball", but the sentiment is the same.

Fire Protection pros (engineers, designers, project managers, estimators, plan reviewers, inspectors) - we're all rare birds.

That acknowledged - where do we look for more help?

If we need help, and we're ready to train new hires, where do we even look?

For larger organizations, this may be well charted. We know X and Y school has related programs, so we go there. Or we know Z technical college has good students, so we go there. Or we badger our employees to always be thinking about hiring their friends or family. Whatever works.

But one of the key questions I kept coming back to in this space was - if most of us don't start in fire protection - which we now have some data to back up that notion - then where do we come from?

If we're looking for new hires to train up - where are they?

Last week we looked at the industries that fire protection professionals started in, and we broke those out by their current organization type.

This week we're looking at that same period in the career - when we first started in fire protection - and are looking at what education we had at that time.

Many studies about the fire protection industry look for current education status - do you have a fire protection degree? High school? Associates? Bachelors? Masters? 

But that doesn't tell us very much. When someone is in the industry for five years and goes to get a Master's in Fire Protection, well, they're already in the industry.

If we're looking to recruit new people to the industry, knowing that someone has a Master's in Fire Protection, and they got it after they were already in the industry, well that's not helpful.

So here, in this question from our study, we asked specifically what education each person had when they first entered the fire protection industry. 

And here are those results:

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​ARCHITECTURAL & ENGINEERING SPACE
For those working in Architecture & Engineering (143 applicable responses):

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CONTRACTING SPACE
For those working in Contracting (178 responses):

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DESIGNERS / ENGINEERING TECHNICIANS SPECIFICALLY
This breaks down individuals who are working as designers or engineering technicians (119 response):

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ENGINEERS SPECIFICALLY
This breaks down individuals who are working as "fire/life safety consultants", "fire protection specialists", or "fire protection engineers" (162 response):

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OTHER ROLES
For other roles, such as project managers, estimators, fire marshals, inspectors, investigators, plan reviewers, and others, there wasn't enough data to give us a good idea for education trends (such as less than 50 respondents).

That said, if there's a role or component of the data you'd want to see - comment below and we'll see if we can make it happen.

TAKEAWAY #1: GET ENGINEERS FROM MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PROGRAMS
Perhaps my biggest takeaway on this, which may have been obvious to others but hasn't been to me, is that if you're looking to hire someone to get into fire protection engineering - go mine the local Mechanical Engineering program! Someone working in our industry is 4x more likely to have a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering than they are to have a Bachelors in Fire Protection Engineering. 

To me, that says a lot. 

Put up posters, go to career fairs, go guest lecture, go talk to ASME (Society of American Mechanical Engineers) or student organizations about fire protection - whatever it takes to make in-roads so that you can hire a few down the road.

TAKEAWAY #2: DESIGNERS COME FROM A VARIETY OF EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUNDS
There is a sizeable contingent of those who are currently in designer / engineering technician roles who had engineering degrees when they first started; that's somewhere around 20% of designers. 

But there's also a large contingent of current designers who started with no college degree (49%) or an associate/technical school (around 20%). 

Designers and engineering technicians don't come from a unified pathway; they come from all over. We saw that last week in the industry where people first started, and we'll see that again when we explore "why" people get into fire protection.

NEXT UP
In the next part of our series we'll look at why people get into the fire protection industry, and I think you'll enjoy those responses just as much as I have.

Thanks and have a great rest of your week!

​- Joe