Asking the following on behalf of a friend in the hope I can offer her some guidance.

Basically, she’s a mum in her early 30s who has decided she wants to become a firefighter. Now I’ll keep the backstory to myself but wondered, for a start, what level of mental and physical fitness/agility she would need to possess. Significantly high I imagine? Do they consider people of lesser ability for certain active roles? I’m guessing they scrutinise candidates, their backgrounds and their motives pretty strongly?

Any pointers appreciated. Ta

Have a look on the fire service resources thread… you’ll soon work out who the firefighters are.

Depends on the area, but Scotland has fitness and maths requirements on the website. Regarding disability etc they will make reasonable adjustments but there is obviously a limit to this operationally

West Yorkshire Info, should imagine theres not a huge difference between areas.

Stages & Key Dates

If she is in West Midlands and isn’t a white man she might be top of the list.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/fire-brigade-accused-discrimination-drive-recruit-women-ethnic-minorities-115834481.html

By 2021, West Midlands Fire Service wants 60 per cent of new recruits to be women, and 35 per cent to be from black and minority ethnic groups.

Down south here, we’ve only just started recruiting again. Would strongly suggest coaching in PQA’s.

Whether that makes good firefighters is up for debate, but it would get her through the paper sift.

As for fitness it’s not super high, but mental toughness is. She will need to be a ‘push on through’ type.

Its also worth saying that we see a lot of nasty stuff, things that make you look at life differently and also whether we want it to or not will be brought home. She needs to understand that will happen, there is no shield.

In my service there is ‘on the run’ or ‘off the run’. There are no easier firefighter jobs. We all start at the bottom and work through to wherever we end up.

Can she play snooker/pool all day in between watching daytime tv, then wash her car, eat like royalty then sleep all night to work a 2nd job next day.

If not the fire service is not for her.

***in before the stw know alls 🤪

Can she play snooker/pool all day in between watching daytime tv, then wash her car, eat like royalty then sleep all night to work a 2nd job next day.

I think you are confusing the fire service with the RAF.

If its meant to be it will be.. failing that youll be weeded out. Like me 🤣

Starting pay is terrible i think though given how tough it is to get in.

If she has the opportunity (lives or works close to an on call fire station) she could try and become an on call firefighter first, normally much less competitive than wholetime jobs and she would do the same job.

Lots of brigades do on call to wholetime transfers too so it can be a good way to get into it.

Last time I looked at applying (many years ago now) the only pre application fitness requirements were acceptable unaided vision and the ability to expand your chest measurement by two inches (as you inhale presumably!!)

Get her to look at the national fitness standards as most brigades use this now as a minimum.

http://www.cfoa.org.uk/18332

We use The Chester Step Test as a basic test. You must acheive 42.3 ml/kg/min to pass so that’s a good place to start.

You must be good at trigonometry.

We use The Chester Step Test as a basic test. You must acheive 42.3 ml/kg/min to pass so that’s a good place to start.

Just found an online pacing vid and had a go..

NB World’s dullest Youtube vid.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xBc2WunZxg

The calc here: https://www.brianmac.co.uk/chester.htm

Scored 46.29, so I could just scrape in at 48….

NB Hardest bit was trying to step in pace with the metronome, found that most confusing…

can be easily ‘fiddled’ too. we played around with the figures (try it on that link) and you find that the best scores are where theres the least change in HR, even if its quite high. so……. say youre really fit with a low resting HR, say 50, and end up with a HR of 120…..that would be a worse score than if you had a high resting HR and still ended up at 120.

when it first came out everyone was trying to rest as much as poss (easy for sleepy firefighters eh? :-)) but soon worked out that they got better scores after a bit of exercise.

so….. bit of walking on the treadmill before you start, the difference is less, higher score!

I’d have thought two minutes is long enough for most fit people’s hearts to normalise to the load; if you were super unfit, then yet running before hand would keep it high for longer, but then you’d probably never get to stage 5…

Ta for the info peeps.

I’ll pass on the tips and see how she moves forward from here. She’ll be looking at a Surrey/Sussex role so I’ll encourage her to speak to a few local services and get a feel for what they can offer at this stage.