Succession planning requirements and future workforce needs
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 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).