THE VOICE JULY, 2020
APPRENTICESHIPS › GRADUATE RECRUITMENT › DEGREE APPRENTICESHIPS
Man on a The Voice's Alannah Francis speaks with the London Fire Brigade's Shaun Coltress
haun Coltress, a station manager within the borough of Tower Hamlets, is responsible for four teams comprising of 28 firefighters. Before he became a firefighter he did everything from being an estate agent to handling 999 calls. Now he’s a leader in a life-saving service where every day presents a different challenge and opportunity to leave a lasting positive impact on others. Here he speaks to The Voice about what he loves about being a firefighter, connecting with communities and why a career in the fire service is for everyone.
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Connecting with communities It’s a misconception that firefighters spend their days running in and out of burning buildings. While that is indeed part of their jobs, there’s a lot more to it than that. The majority of a fire fighter’s work is prevention focused, involving activities such as educating others about fire safety and ensuring they are well equipped and prepared in an emergency. Affecting positive change within his local community is one of the ma-
jor highlights of being a firefighter for Coltress. “For me, the best thing about working for the Fire Brigade is definitely about making a real difference in the community day-to-day, whether that be attending incidents and making people’s day a little it better, because quite often we come across members of the public when it’s what they would see as the worst day of their life,” he said. This tangible impact on the community surrounding his station, that Coltress believes is one of the best things about working for the London Fire Brigade, has manifested itself in a number of ways.
During his time working as a London firefighter, Coltress has opened up the Shadwell fire station’s doors to the public in a variety of ways. Thanks to him Shadwell became the first fire station in London to deliver NHS blood donation sessions, something that was particularly important due to the lack of BAME donors. “We’re doing it in a really underrepresented area, Shadwell, with a really high Asian population here, which the NHS need blood donations from. So to be able to help the community in
that way and help the NHS for me was really massive thing,” he said. The station has also hosted catchup vaccinations for young people in the local area who missed out on immunisations, employability workshops with charities and given a home to the local St John’s Ambulance unit. “We actually got a regional commendation from the St John’s Ambulance for helping them to do that and what that does is give us access to quite a lot of people, vulnerable people especially within the borough of Tower Hamlets and allows us to carry out our prevention work in a really good way and build trust with the local community,” Coltress said.
A world of opportunities “If you’ve not got the aspiration to progress through the ranks, there’s still a lot of opportunity to develop yourself through different things,” Coltress said. “We have specialist units. You have what we call our rescue unit which will do things like land and water rescue, they’ll absail down the side of buildings to rescue people from window cradles if they have to. You don’t have to go for promotion to do that but it’s a really specialised skill.
“We’ve got the fire investigation team where you investigate fires, which is really important. There are our aerial appliances, which are our high reach vehicles.” For those hoping to rise through the ranks, Coltress is full of praise about the amount of support on offer and the variety of routes individuals can take. “With the size of London and the size of the London Fire Brigade itself, there is a massive opportunity to get promoted if you want to. There’s the opportunity iitally to take on temporary promotion if you’ve been assessed as suitable so you can try out the role you’re going for eventually and get some experience in that role,” he said. What makes a good firefighter? With so many options and the ability to have a huge impact, Coltress strongly believes a career within the fire service is one for everyone but he highlights a willingness to learn, key traits for those considering the challenge. “We need people who are going to work well as part of a team, who are resilient because there will be times in the job where it will be difficult – it could be 3 o’clock in the morning, snowing outside and we’ve got a job to do...so we need resilient people,” he said. He added: “We also need people who have the right attitude that really want to prevent fires and injuries from fires in the community. Who are happy speaking with members of the community because that’s a really large part of what we do – the prevention work. We need people who are confident – we climb ladders to the fourth floor and we go into buildings, occasionally, that are on fire.” For Coltress, a career in the fire service offers something that’s quite rare – the knowledge that you’ve made a difference on a daily basis. “At the end of the day, when you go home there’s not many jobs like this where you can think back over your day and actually pinpoint where you’ve made a difference – whether that be to a person, to a community or to yourself,” he said. “No day is ever the same but you can always look back and say you know what, I made a difference in that community today, I kept some people safe.”
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