Dauphin's Fire Chief Cam Abrey has a new designation after completing the Executive Chief Fire Officer program through the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs. Abrey says he's been working on the program for a while, and it's nice to have finally completed it.
"I started the program actually four years ago, upon return from a Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs Fire Rescue Canada conference in Vancouver. I had come back and signed up for it and was ready to get going, and they assigned an assessor to me from the council. I started submitting my assignments but the assessor retired without me knowing about it, and I just kind of put everything on pause."
Abrey says once the pandemic hit, there were other items that came to the forefront rather than the assignments.
"After a little bit of a delay and a pause, and a lot of hard work, I finally got it done and submitted in time to receive my designation at the conference this past Tuesday evening."
Abrey says a lot of work went into the program, with 30 different assignments, but it allowed him to take a better look at the work he does.
"It helped me discover a lot of the stuff that I've done, but never thought about, because it was just my ordinary everyday duties that I've been doing. When they're asking for examples of how you've dealt with human resources, as a part of my assignment I had to submit various things that we've had to deal with, within the fire service."
Abrey says he had to look at how he dealt with governing the department, how they've found other sources of revenue, prepared budgets, and different fire prevention techniques.
