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Published: September 30, 2007 11:19 pm
Q&A: Dispatcher granted professional designation
By April Amadon/amadona@gnnewspaper.com
Lockport Union-Sun & Journal
A Niagara County sheriff's dispatcher has become one of the first in the country to obtain a new professional designation in his field.
Senior Dispatcher Mathew Swierczek, who has been with the communications division for nine years, recently received the designation of Registered Public Safety Leader by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials.
Swierczek is the first in Western New York to be named as an RPL.
The course was completed online, and Swierczek traveled to Baltimore in August to attend the APCO national conference.
QUESTION: What does this new designation mean?
ANSWER: Basically, it adds a professional designation out of the field of public safety communications. I guess it allows people that are seeking careers in that field to sit in concert with other people that look at the career through the same eyes and the same feeling for the need for professionalism in it.
It’s similar to other fields that would hold the same type of professionalism requirements. You can get different types of certifications through management. It’s allowing for a specific field that people choose.
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Q: How did you learn about it?
A: The program was brand new. I learned about it through APCO’s Web site. I’ve been a member there for about five years. They offer various educational opportunities. I noticed it was there, read about it a little. It being a new program, it was actually their first session. Myself, along with 39 others, are the first in the world really to hold the designation. It was a very challenging nine months. It’s actually a 12-month program, but because it was the first session, we only had nine months to complete it before the conference. So it was basically a search for more education, and I came across it through their Web site.
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Q: What did you learn that will help you in your career?
A: The way the course itself was set up, it consists of six mini-courses, five of those were done through online sessions, and that was through the American Management Association. (They focused on) business communications, leadership skills, how to conduct employee appraisals and performance appraisals, building high performance teams, a lot of things that center on the skills you would need in the business world to be a productive and efficient manager, only with a little bit of a spin with public safety communications in mind. The sixth and final course was about the APCO organization ... they want to benefit from it somewhat to create new leaders in their organization. You learned more about their history and their inner workings.
... I think what APCO is doing is providing a much-needed link to better education and to career development in that field. In my job, I see a lot of career development for police officers and ongoing training for firefighters ... you see a lot of training that’s specific for the field responders, but not so much for the dispatchers. When you really think about it, we’re the first on the scene, although not physically, but we’re the ones who are getting information from the ones that are there.
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Q: What are the challenges faced by people in the public safety communications field?
A: I think the biggest challenge is the fact that a lot of people don’t really know that we’re there. They don’t know that telecommunicators and dispatchers are part of the public safety system. I think a lot of people just assume when they call 911 that they’re going to talk to a fireman or a policeman on the telephone. ... One challenge for this area is, in a lot of other parts of the country, it’s a career, and it’s very definitive career with a lot of places doing things like consolidated dispatch. ... Where a lot of places here in the Northeast, Western New York included, it’s still a very parochial system, where it’s handled agency to agency.
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Q: Would you recommend the course to your fellow dispatchers?
A: Anyone that’s able to expand their knowledge in the field they choose to work, it’s always a plus. Sheriff Beilein, through what he’s done with developing the dispatch field, creating civilian dispatchers and moving toward consolidated dispatch ... has done a lot for the public safety communications field in this area.
Contact reporter April Amadon at 439-9222, ext. 6251.
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