PSISeptember2017

FIRE SAFETY
New Qualifications for Fire Detection
and Alarm Systems
The Fire Industry
Association (FIA) is
about release four allnew
qualifications in
fire detection and
alarm systems. In
short, there’ll be on
qualification each for
designers, installers,
maintainers and
commissioners. Here,
Martin Duggan
examines the
reasoning behind this
move and what it
means for the FIA,
learners and the
industry as a whole
fter a soft launch at FIREX International
A2017, the Fire Industry Association (FIA)
will be releasing four new qualifications in
fire detection and alarm systems. In short, one
each for designers, installers, maintainers and
commissioners. The overiding intention here is
to replace the general training that the FIA has
been conducting for many years now.
In fact, we’ve been running fire detection and
alarm systems training in a similar format since
2000 and trained over 30,000 delegates across
our 17 different courses (so not just in fire
detection and alarms). Our current run-rates are
300 courses across the year and the country, in
turn training around 4,000 delegates each year.
FIA training has pretty much become the de
facto standard for proving (or partially proving)
competence. I discovered a job advert on a
recruiter’s website only last week, and the
common language was the FIA’s Units 1 and 5,
etc (ie the names of our current courses). So it’s
becoming a common language within fire
detection and alarms (and within recruitment),
and is often a requirement set by employers.
Why is the FIA involved in training and
education? We have a Memorandum of
Association – it’s our constitution, and the very
second objective is education and training. Put
simply, it’s in our DNA.
The FIA is a not-for-profit organisation so any
moneys that we make are put back into training
and development or are ploughed back into
research. We launched a project five years ago
with the aim that 5% of our turnover goes back
into research projects. Those research projects
are for the good of the fire industry. Everything
that the FIA does is fed back into the industry.
What have we done to underpin the new
qualifications? We’ve become an Awarding
Organisation. What does that mean in the real
world? Essentially, it means that we’ve been
placed on the Register for Awarding
Organisations and can write qualifications for
subsequent approval by Ofqual and other
official Government bodies for examinations.
To become an Awarding Organisation has
taken us a long time and much hard work.
There’s an awful lot of policies and protocols
that we had to put in place that must be
inspected against. Suffice it to say that we had
to jump through a good many hoops in order to
become an Awarding Organisation.
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