Succession planning requirements and future workforce needs
Wholetime
Wholetime staffing needs will be shaped by CRMP demand and station modelling.
Changes to stations, crewing models, and risk-based response requirements will influence:
- the number of wholetime firefighters required,
- distribution of roles across stations,
- specialist skills required at different locations, and
- future use of day-crewed or hybrid models if risk or resources change.
Retirement forecasts show substantial movement across supervisory and middle management roles. Future workforce needs include:
- sufficient firefighters to offset planned retirements and changes to stations and crewing models,
- robust candidate pipelines for crew and watch manager promotions, and
- development capacity for station and group managers.
On-call
On-call staff provide essential resilience to the Service’s response model, particularly in rural areas.
Strengthening the on-call pipeline to enhance availability, future needs include:
- improved daytime and weekday availability,
- increased recruitment in low availability stations,
- enhanced community engagement to attract local talent, and
- employer engagement and support schemes.
A flexible range of contracts must continue to support:
- parents and carers,
- retired operational staff,
- students,
- self-employed residents, and
- shift workers.
Skills development, improvements are required in:
- access to training for on-call staff,
- monitoring of competence via on-call skills dashboards, and
- specialist skills coverage
(e.g., water rescue, wildfire).