 weeks of on-site training and six weeks of on the job training. The on-site training is a combination of classroom theory and practical application on our extensive fire ground. The on the job training assignments allow the recruits to further develop their skills under the mentorship of an experienced crew and officer. The recruits respond to real emergency calls for six weeks, gaining valuable experience and confidence.
Graduates of the Pre-Employment Program are employed in career departments throughout the country.
The Mobile Burn Unit (MBU), which began its inaugural provincial tour in April 2010, is a complete standalone live fire trainer with fixed internal burn pads, external and internal mobile burn pads and rollover capability. The first of its kind in Atlantic Canada, this 53 foot unit is equipped with a second storey, interior and exterior stairways and a roof vent simulation unit.
Firefighters are challenged by the seven movable walls and forcible entry simulator that allow for multiple configurations making each run a new learning experience. In addition, the integrated smoke system allows for rapid black-out conditions, further challenging firefighters’ search skills.
Welcome to our store! Have a browse through our and current manuals and clothing items. From textbooks and study guides, to our popular hoodies and tshirts, you should be able to find just about anything!
We encourage you to browse around the site. If there’s something that you can’t find, let us know and we’ll see if we can help get you what you are looking for.
We strive to offer the lowest prices and all revenue is used for the training of firefighters and other emergency service providers.
The Nova Scotia Firefighters School's Board of Directors is 29 members strong with representation from every county in our province, as well as the Fire Marshal, an FSANS rep and eight At Large members. The Board meets several times a year, either by conference call or in face-to-face meetings. The Directors relay the concerns of our Membership to the Executive and Administration of the School.
For over forty years the Nova Scotia Firefighters School has had full time staff to administer the various programs and services provided by the School. In the last decade, our staff has grown from four “full timers” to fourteen. If you need information, want to get enrolled in a course, or want to order a book, feel free to call upon us. We’d be more than happy to help you out!
The Nova Scotia Firefighters School is a non profit organization that has been in operation since 1967.
Through the County or Mutual Aid Associations, each county in the province elects or appoints a director to represent their county on the school’s Board of Directors. Whether it’s a meeting or a conference call, the counties, through their directors, provide guidance in the operations of the school and relay concerns and ideas. That means equal representation for each area of the province and every fire department.
By paying a nominal fee of $100.00, your fire department registers your entire department as members.
As a member, every person in your fire department will receive $10 off their training each time they take a course. Your dues are recovered after just 10 members receive training!
As a member, your department has representation at the NSFS annual meeting, where the “Directors at Large” and the Executive Committee are elected for the following year.
Memberships are valid for one year starting on January 1st. The cost is $100.00 per department.
Please contact the School for more information or click here for the membership application.
Copyright © 2018 Nova Scotia Firefighters School - All Rights Reserved.The Wire Bit is just what it sounds like - it allows you to physically separate your Bits. Try it whenever you need to break up your chain of Bits, like when you need to put a light at the top of a model building! You'll find many situations where you want a wire Bit.
THE UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX makes little secret of the fact that it offers higher IT salaries than most state institutions. According to Joe Mildenhall, CIO of Phoenix parent company Apollo Group, there's also the potential for staffers to earn stock options as they move into management ranks. Then too, because the IT organization supports about 330,000 students worldwide, the hardware and software in use tend to be high-quality and cutting-edge. "We invest heavily in our technology because we have to for our scale and for what we're maintaining from a reliability and security standpoint," says Mildenhall.
And Karen Tan, the tech support and operations manager for UMassOnline, points out her favorite advantage of working for the online side of her school: "You're not fighting with students for a place to park."
Sure, there are plusses to the "virtual" side of IT ops in higher ed. Yet negatives exist, too.
When Mildenhall meets with CIOs from other schools, "They talk about the resident populations of their students; the challenges providing bandwidth and dealing with downloads, filtering, and more. We don't really have that," he says, pointing to Phoenix's core challenge: supporting hundreds of thousands of students. "The amount of design and attention to supporting scale is something most colleges don't have to worry about. We don't have many off-the-shelf options; we've had to build a lot of our own stuff."
In fact, that scale requires an IT organization of about 1,300, including a call center with a staff of 400 to support students and faculty; 200 to 250 desktop support staffers to support the 17,000 employees; an infrastructure group to manage the operations of servers, storage, and the networks; plus three software application groups-- one focused on back-office systems, another creating customer and outward-facing applications, and a third for developing inhouse apps to support staff. With the exception of desktop support to provide help in 170-plus physical locations, IT operations are centralized in the Phoenix, AZ, area.
While the sheer size of the IT organization provides opportunity for promotion from within, Mildenhall admits that some employees feel boxed in. "There's a world of difference between an infrastructure where 50 people interact with servers, versus a shop where three people do," he says. Yet, "An advantage is that people are able to develop deep expertise that they may not be able to if they're generalists; expertise in intrusion detection technology, virtualization, or database administration, for instance."
On the flip side, some people see that as limiting, he concedes. "One person is racking up hardware, another is doing the base system install, and another is doing the application install on that particular server."
Still, for individuals accustomed to working in a public institution environment where there's "one of everything," Phoenix can mandate a certain level of uniformity; it maintains a menu of features that any individual college may opt to use or not. "We have a lot more central control. There isn't ‘This department wants to do it this way with these tools, and that department wants to do it that way with another set of tools,'" explains Mildenhall.
Interestingly, he hasn't witnessed many IT professionals moving to traditional universities from the for-profit space. "State institutions can't compete salary-wise," he observes, adding. "People are in those [traditional] jobs for reasons other than pay."
The biggest U of Phoenix hiring challenge right now, says Mildenhall, is on the software engineering side: finding people who can do Java and web-based programming for high-volume, high-availability websites. Where the skills exist internally, the company promotes from within. Phoenix also hires through federal visa and green card programs.
Working on the digital side of higher ed is high-profile. The value of the services being offered by the UMassOnline IT organization has placed it in a leadership role.
The nine-person IT staff of which Karen Tan is part (and which hosts all of the online platforms for the five-campus UMass system as well as for nearly a dozen state and local community colleges) is stationed off-campus in Shrewsbury, where University Information Technology Systems also is housed.
Tan came out of the UMass-Lowell campus's continuing/ distance ed department, where she was moving Lowell's online courses over to the UMassOnline platform, which launched in 2001. Gone are the days of working out of an old, drafty university building, she notes. The current environment has a "more corporate look and feel." Her skills have evolved too. Because UMassOnline has students all over the world (33,900 at last count), the 17,000 annual support requests are handled via e-mail, phone, and online chat 365 days a year, 24/7.
Tan recalls her previous (9 to 5) job required serving walkin students or faculty who were having trouble connecting to an online course or couldn't upload a file. "They could bring their laptops and get immediate gratification," she says, and she admits she misses those aspects of the job. "[Working for the online campus] means less face-to-face interaction. I have to rely on technology to reach out to those I work with."
In her job today, "You need to be very patient to walk users through troubleshooting over the phone or via e-mail, versus taking laptops from them and resolving the problems yourself," Tan explains. For that reason, when she's interviewing a new job candidate, she asks, "How do you deal with the most unruly customers?" Fortunately, Tan understands the virtual experience from both sides of the chat window, since she received her BS in IT through UMassOnline.
Today, Tan's team uses an external service provider, ConnectedLearning Network, to provide first-tier support. Her group handles escalation