Learning from the Adjacent
Finding Related Professional Development to Accelerate Your Learning
When considering how to prepare yourself for an uncertain future, there is no single path that outlines the steps that every single emergency manager and crisis leader should follow. Since professional development is unique to each individual, it has to be something customized to address the areas that you want to improve upon and a path that capitalizes on your strengths.
This path has to be driven by you, but where do you turn to learn new skills?
For many people who work in public safety-related fields, the security industry, and the military, it is natural to turn to the training and education opportunities that are provided by and customized for those fields. That makes sense since there are certain things (including many technical skills) that professionals in those fields need to be able to do. But there are also a number of limitations.
For example, much of this type of public safety-focused training is provided by or was created by government entities. This means that there are inherent limitations to the number of certified instructors who can teach a course, the number of courses offered in your area each year, and the number of students who can attend. In my experience, very little of this training is offered on-demand, and, because of the limitations on who can attend, the demand for courses leading to a certification far exceeds the supply of course offerings. Especially when courses include prerequisites, the certifications you are pursuing to advance your career and skillset might be years away.
Yet the disasters, emergencies, incidents, and crises that could affect your organization are not going to wait for you to be “ready.”
Another option for professionals looking to develop themselves is to search for adjacent fields and industries that regularly develop similar skills. Sometimes, the best source of learning is from someone you least expect, and starting your education journey through an adjacent field can significantly shorten the time needed to become proficient in a new skill.
Finding Learning Opportunities through Adjacent Professions
For professionals seeking new development opportunities, a great place to start the search for related training is often in the private sector, especially for government employees. This might not seem like the natural first place to begin your search, but there is a lot to learn from organizations and professions in which there are financial incentives to develop skills and abilities quickly.
To highlight the professional development overlap between the private and public sectors, consider the Incident Command System (ICS) that is used as a standard on-scene emergency response concept used by many organizations.
The ICS is nothing more than a standardized form of project management to guide the responses to incidents. The challenge in ICS, however, is that it can take years (and sometimes an entire career) to be able to attain the certifications and attend the courses necessary to progress in your responsibilities and serve in leadership roles.
Yet during disasters and large-scale crises, people are always taking on challenging roles to meet an unmet need and doing so despite the courses they have or haven’t attended in the past.
Instead of waiting for an annual or semiannual offering of an ICS course, project management courses can provide emergency managers and crisis leaders with great opportunities to develop their disaster-response capabilities. There are on-demand courses that cover every facet of project management as well. There are courses on project stakeholder management that can help an incident’s liaison officers, project scheduling and resource allocation that can prepare operations section chiefs, project budgeting for an incident’s finance section, resource acquisition and distribution for the logistics section, and many more areas that extend beyond traditional ICS positions.
By reframing the professional development need from “I want to become a logistics section chief” to “I want to learn how to acquire the supplies and equipment that my team needs to accomplish its goals,” the opportunities to learn those skills and become competent in the field increase very quickly. Because project management is something that companies have found worthwhile to develop in their businesses, there is an entire industry of online education that has been created to meet that need. This means that you can find courses right now that are relevant to you and your goals, and you can likely find options that are relatively inexpensive.
As you go through courses and training programs that have a private-sector focus, use your best judgment to determine what material from the course directly applies to your field and what doesn’t. Learning from adjacent fields to the topic that you want to study can help you develop a deeper appreciation of the underlying principles that go into that topic, help you learn how to apply and adapt concepts in real-world settings, and help you meet the needs of your customers, clients, constituents, or community members.
Pursuing Paths to Competence
Identifying related fields to jumpstart and advance your professional development might take trial and error. But the payoff and perspective gained through the process can help prepare you to adapt to more types of situations. While I highlighted the similarities between project management and incident management above, here are some additional examples of related fields as well:
From Collections or Targeting to Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Courses focused on ABM can help you learn how to develop customized strategies and campaigns (based on the specific characteristics of a prospective client) to engage with and gain access to that potential customer or client. These courses have a number of parallels to public safety and military leaders.
From Volunteer Management to Onboarding Programs for Sales Professionals: If your disaster response plans include integrating volunteers to meet the demands of an incident, learning how sales organizations onboard new team members by using “leading indicators” to establish onboarding goals can be helpful. Sales organizations have an interest in shortening the amount of time needed for new professionals to begin making meaningful contributions. This is often the same goal during incident response operations – to quickly integrate a surge force as quickly and as effectively as possible. You can read about examples of leading indicators in a LinkedIn post here (or the same post on substack here).
From Public Safety Leadership to Portfolio Management: Leaders who have been promoted from within the organization, especially when it is based on their performance in their current role, can learn a lot from professional portfolio managers. How portfolio managers focus their time on the projects, programs, and initiatives important to their agency can help build organizational structures supporting servant leadership principles and concepts.
Finding adjacent fields to learn from will undoubtedly take some creativity. But the opportunities to develop competence in new areas, and to do so in a shorter amount of time, will help emergency management and crisis leadership professionals to prepare themselves and their organizations for the disasters and disruptions to come.