Palm Beach County Fire Rescue Leverages Vector Solutions’ App To Record Annual Evaluations for 1,400+ Firefighters

THE CHALLENGE

Located in southeastern Florida, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue (PBC Fire Rescue) covers 1,769 square miles and provides services to 960,000+ residents within its jurisdiction. In addition to responding to fires, the department also answers calls regarding chemical spills, aircraft emergencies, plane crashes, water rescues, animal rescues, hazardous weather, and more.

As one of the largest fire departments in the state of Florida, the training division provides annual training to approximately 1,400 members, in addition to running recruit academies and offering professional development opportunities. The sheer size of the department means that at any given time, the training division could have hundreds of evaluations due within the month.

THE CHOICE

Before getting started with Vector Solutions, PBC Fire Rescue utilized an in-house database to track training and paper and pen to manage live skill evaluations. However, as the in-house system was no longer meeting their needs, the Chief made the decision to acquire a dedicated training management system.

In 2013, PBC Fire Rescue chose Vector Solutions as its training technology partner and implemented Vector LMS training management system on the recommendation of a fire department in a neighboring county.

The department chose to expand its partnership with Vector Solutions in 2021 and implemented Evaluations+, a live skills evaluations app.

THE CHANGE

Through Vector Evaluations+, PBC Fire Rescue has:

• Eliminated paper processes with digitized task books.
• Improved compliance with yearly evaluation requirements.
• Simplified tracking completion progress through integrations with Vector LMS.
• Expanded documentation of live skills training for recruits with Evaluations+ video functionality.

• Empowered members by giving them the ability to track their own training status.

According to training division leadership, the implementation of Evaluations+ has made managing evaluations, task books, and other training-related duties much easier, as well as improved the user experience for their members.

“Compared to what we had before, it’s night and day for our firefighters,” the Recruit Academy Coordinator said. “It’s all right there. They don’t have to go chasing paper or deal with coffee stains or ink rubbing off. We don’t have to deal with people’s handwriting…it’s 1000% better than what we had before.”

The reporting functionality offered by Evaluations+ has also been beneficial.

“I combine all the tasks and I put it in a nice PDF. It’s an actual task book and it looks very professional. When someone is done with their task book, it gets put into a credential in Vector LMS so if say, two years from now, someone wants to see it, it’s easily available for them,” the Compliance Officer said.