Where do Fire Professionals Start Their Career?

Where do fire protection professionals come from?
 
This is a follow-up to the first article in this series where we are discussing takeaways from our industry sourcing survey.
 
What do we hope to answer?

1. How do people even hear about fire protection?
2. Do most in the industry go straight into fire protection? If not, where do they come from?
3.  Why do people go into fire protection?

 
Last week we answered #1, today, we’re covering where people actually come from. I’ll break this out again by the source (A/E, Contracting, AHJ/Gov’t, and Insurance/Manufacturing/Users) as it perhaps is the best way to get suggestions for future recruiting.
​

SO, WHERE WAS OUR FIRST "REAL" JOB?
 
ARCHITECTURAL & ENGINEERING SPACE
For Architecture & Engineering (139 applicable responses):

CONTRACTING SPACE
For Contractors (178 responses):

AUTHORITIES HAVING JURISDICTION / GOVERNMENT
For those in government and AHJ roles (64 responses):

TAKEAWAYS
What do you find interesting? What takeaways do you see in the data?

Personally, here's what I found interesting or surprising about these notes:

SO MUCH OF THE INDUSTRY DOESN'T "START" IN FIRE PROTECTION
We mentioned this last week, but anecdotally it seems as though many people in the industry didn't exactly 'intend' to end up in fire protection. The data from our survey seems to suggest the same consistently throughout the different user groups.

OF THESE FIELDS, CONTRACTORS HAVE THE MOST PEOPLE WHO "STARTED" IN FIRE PROTECTION
We'll dive deeper into this later on, but so many in contracting get in "because" of friends and family that it would make sense that their first "real" job is directly in the fire protection industry. That said, there's still just as many people even in contracting that didn't first start out in fire protection as people who did. 

I would imagine the same wouldn't be said for fields like architecture, structural engineering or mechanical engineering.

HOW FEW PEOPLE IN AHJ/GOVERNMENT ROLES STARTED IN FIRE PROTECTION
Personally, I was very surprised at how few people in AHJ and Government roles actually started in fire protection from the survey. This is also our most limited data set, so I can't take away too many conclusions from that subset.

HOW BIG OF AN INFLUENCE MECHANICAL ENGINEERING HAS ON FIRE PROTECTION
Traditionally, fire suppression has been a "subset" of mechanical engineering. This can be seen in the way project specification divisions used to be arranged, or how many mechanical engineers have traditionally specified fire suppression systems.

All of fire protection isn't just in fire sprinklers, of course, but the data we get continues to say that of people who didn't start in fire protection, the most popular starting point was mechanical engineering.

I would think the next few weeks will also support the notion, but if we need to find good people - it's time to start recruiting the best mechanical engineers!

The next part of this series will cover college degrees when we 'first' got into fire protection, which could help highlight exactly where we started out and what we had pursued prior to being in the industry. 

Why is all this important? 

Well, if you're a team leader, a recruiter, a manager, or someone in a role where you need help - then it's time to start recruiting!

Where do you go? Where have people gone before? Where do we, as an industry, have the most luck in finding talent?

Well - look at the data. Check out your user group (are you a contractor? engineer? AHJ?), and see where people historically have come from. That's the first hint on where you might have the most success first.

​We'll go deeper on this in the next part, for now - have a great rest of your week!