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Certification Certification of our VFD Management Course requires that the participant has successfully completed the entire curriculum as a registered student and studied under the supervision of a certified instructor. Successful certifications and accreditations requirements are: review of the quality of work/answers for the exercises in each module, successful application of the material in the management of the fire/EMS department, and final certification exam scores as follows: Certified Instructor - requires the completion of the VFD Management Course with a minimum of a 95%+ proficiency to be eligible to enroll in the instructors' module of the curriculum. Upon the completion of this component, the participant will student-teach a group of other registered users until the completion of instructing a total of 25 students. After meeting this requirement, the student-teacher will take the instructor's exam and achieve certification with a score of 100% on this exam. Instructors are eligible then to earn $1,000 per registered student they teach, using the educational materials, examples and exercises in the curriculum developed and provided by VFD-Funding. Senior Officer Certification - requires the participant to score 90%+ on the certification exam. Senior officers are defined as chief, assistant chiefs, president and vice president of the department. Junior Officer Certification - requires the participant to score 85%+ on the certification exam. Junior officers are defined as captains, lieutenants, secretary and/or treasurer of the department Completion Certification - requires the participant to score 80%+ on the certification exam. To qualify to take the certification exam you must first become a registered user, which is achieved by enrolling as a registered participant and any of the following: 1. We feel and we believe you to agree that the materials in the VFD Management Course are so vital that we make the on-line materials FREE for all to use, whether or not they are registered users pursuing the course for certification. We also make 100 scholarships available for FREE to those students we believe have the best chance of completing the curriculum, becoming successful and effective administrative and line officers, and becoming certified instructors. Our criteria for these scholarships are for persons over the age of twenty-one (21) years of age, have at least an associates degree (any major) from an accredited college or university, two (2) or more years of experience as an officer, and five (5) or more years of firefighting/EMS service experience. We regret we must limit this number and have such high eligibility standards, but due to the level of difficulty of the material, amount of material in the course, and time that is required to mentor each student, we have a limited amount of resources to devote to this, because of our low and affordable fees for our core services. 2. When your department has VFD-Funding help finance the acquisition of a new piece of apparatus for you (cost of $150,000+), we also include two (2) FREE scholarships to the VFD Management Course for two (2) of your officers or members. 3. You can become a registered user and participate by paying a tuition of $2,500, which we can finance for you, or it may be possible that six (6) or more of the members of your department could enroll and the tuition be paid by a training grant. We can also help you to apply for this grant. If you have six (6) registered participants from your department, we will add an additional registration (total of seven participants) for FREE. If you have ten (10) or more tuition paying registered users in your department, we will then provide two (2) more FREE scholarships to become a registered participant pursuing certification. (We will consider officer/members of up to two other departments, where you and they have a mutual-aid agreement, as officers/members of your department) I want to participate in the course for certification, but I don't have any money, nor does my department. What can and should I do? You can do any of the following: 1. Enroll every year until you are selected for a scholarship. 2. Contact VFD-Funding for a payment plan or help in getting a grant. 3. Have your department contact us per funding you apparatus acquisition and get one of the two (2) scholarships we give to our clients. 4. Until you are enrolled as a registered participant working toward certification, take the course on-line for FREE and use and apply the materials, examples and do the exercises. This way, when you do become a registered participant enrolled and working toward certification, you will have already studied and used the materials, know it well, and thus helping you greatly to achieve the minimum of the required eighty percent (80%) necessary to qualify for even our fundamental certification. Can I re-test for a higher certification, if I don't get a certification score I am pursuing or wish to try to score higher? Yes, re-registration tuition is $1,000 and you must wait one (1) year since your last exam to show more experience and gain more skills in applying what you learn from the VFD Management Course. Again, we can finance this amount for you and we can assist you in applying for a training grant to cover this tuition. HOWEVER, if your final exam score is below seventy-five percent (75%), we will not accept you for any further training to qualify for certification. We believe that scores below 75% indicate persons who would most likely prove not to be good candidates for officers and we simply just don't wish to take anybody's money for no reason or certify those persons who would not make excellent officers. Those scoring below 75% are welcome to use the FREE on-line materials to help them, but we cannot consider them any further as registered users pursuing certification from us. I want to be a certified instructor. How do I achieve this and how long will this take? This depends upon you, how hard you work, how much time you devote to pursuing this, how successfully you apply what you learn, your final certification exam score, how well you student-teach, and your score of 100% on the instructors certification exam. Becoming a certified instructor will take a little over a year, given the time necessary to complete the course yourself and the time necessary for the registered participants you student teach to complete the course. You will need a minimum of fifty percent (50%) of the minimum of twenty-five (25) participants you student-teach to score higher than 80% on the certification final exam we administer and we will need to review your students' work, answers, and application of what they learn from each module. We pay our student-teachers $100 per student they teach, thus if you make it to become a student-teacher, on your road to becoming a certified instructor, you then have recovered your cost of initially taking the course and you've rewarded yourself for achieving your 95%+ score. We pay our certified instructors $1,000 per student they teach out of the $2,500 registered student's tuition, we require you use our on-line materials, our hardcopy materials, our suggested supplemental materials and our methods and practices. Our hardcopy materials are available through us at VFD-Funding, however you can use the FREE on-line materials we provide in the VFD Management Course. Only VFD-Funding is authorized to administer the final exam for certification, which changes somewhat every year, to insure the quality of officers and officer candidates we certify. We also reserve the right to issue several different versions of the certification exam, even to registered users who may be members of the same fire/EMS department. How much can I earn as a VFD Management Course instructor? This depends upon the number of registered participants you teach, the quality of these participants, how much time they and you spend working on the course, and your effectiveness as an instructor. Of course if you refer, recommend, register and enroll participants, you become their instructor. Instructors will probably have a total of 100 participants at any given time and factoring that each participant will need about one (1) year to complete the course, it would then appear an instructor could make $100,000 - $125,000 (or slightly more) per year. Can I lose my instructor's certification? Yes and unfortunately. If in two consecutive years more than 50% of your students score lower than 80% on their final exam. We then have to consider the quality of instructor you proved to be, along with the quality of students you have recruited. By doing this, we insure that you recruit quality registered students, you provide them quality instruction and you work hard to help them achieve their own success. You will have a probationary period of one (1) year and during your probationary year you will need to teach a minimum of ten (10) or more students with at least seventy-five percent (75%) of them scoring higher than eighty percent (80%) on their certification exam. My instructor lost their certification. Can I get a refund? No, but you will get another free chance, without needing to pay the additional $1,000 fee under these conditions: 1. You were a registered participant within two (2) years of your instructor losing their certification. 2. Your score was higher than fifty percent (50%) on your exam. If your score was less than fifty percent (50%), then the onus for this failure solely rests upon you and you have shown yourself a follower and not a leader and that you do not have the initiative and self-discipline to become an officer. Given all of the information we provide FREE and on-line, including to those who are not registered users pursuing certification, there is NO EXCUSE for anybody to score lower than fifty percent (50%) on the initial certification exam. 3. You will still need to wait a minimum of one (1) year since last taking your exam, to gain more information and experience, to then further help you to score higher on the certification exam. Will my certification guarantee that I become an officer? No, because you will still need to be voted into office by other members of your volunteer or combined department, or you will need to meet other promotional criteria, if you are employed by a combined or paid department. What certification and successful completion of the VFD Management course will show is that you know what you are doing, you are qualified, and there exists the potentials and high likelihood that you will be a successful and effective officer, per your level of certification. Your certification will give you something to show to other members of your department and employers that in addition to your other qualifications, education and experience that you are someone who should be considered to be an officer. Last modified: January 12, 2008
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