For more than two years, both Gloucestershire Fire & Rescue Service and West Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service have used VCA’s promotion support services, including the Career Progression Gateway (CPG), as part of their approach to leadership selection and development.
Recent HMICFRS inspections recognised strengths within both services in areas including leadership, workforce development, organisational culture, fairness, diversity and continuous improvement. HMICFRS also highlighted Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service’s “open, fair and honest recruitment process”.
Positive HMICFRS findings provide independent evidence that both services are performing strongly in areas that rely heavily on leadership capability. While those outcomes reflect the efforts of many people and initiatives, they also reinforce the importance of selecting and developing the right leaders.
The CPG supports this by providing a structured, evidence-based assessment of readiness for leadership roles. Rather than relying solely on experience, reputation or interview performance, it helps services make promotion decisions based on evidence of how candidates are likely to perform at the next level by objectively assessing their leadership behaviours during realistic job simulation exercises.
HMICFRS recognised:
How the CPG supports this
We are delighted to continue supporting both Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service and West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service with recruitment, promotion and leadership development. Positive inspection outcomes are built over many years, and sustaining them depends on maintaining strong leadership capability at every level of the organisation.
The leaders we help identify today will play an important role in shaping the culture, capability and performance that HMICFRS assesses in the years ahead.
