Environmental symposium students complete 32,000 hours of instruction

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Students and instructors alike developed a new appreciation for the word training during the 2005 Environmental Training Symposium, which ended here today.

About 153 instructors taught 111 courses to more than 1,250 students throughout the week-long event at the Kentucky International Convention Center.

More than 32,100 hours of instruction was given throughout the training symposium, which required attendees to participate in a minimum of 26 hours of classes, said J.P. Smith, the symposium director.

On track to complete close to 30 hours of instruction during the event was Staff Sgt. Jared Scoggins of the Air Force Repair Enhancement Program at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz.

The circuit card technician is also the units environmental coordinator, and he said he learned a lot about where to simply obtain loads of information relating to a number of issues relating to his jobs.

I signed up for 30 classes and pretty much got all the ones I wanted, he said. They all have given me a broad overview of everything.

The safety courses benefited the seven-year veteran the most, he said, but it was the media training course that surprised him.

I thought it was going to be a horrible two-hour block of instruction, said Sergeant Scoggins. But the class taught me a lot. Now I watch the news in a totally different light, and if I was deployed, I feel like I definitely could handle the media much better.

Of all the students who attended the training symposium, about 83 percent of them were attending the event for the first time.

That tells us there is a big need for the curriculum and training, Mr. Smith said of the event, which consisted of students from across the Air Force, other government agencies and national academia.

Part of that curriculum based on trends reported by bases, the Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations included a 10-hour Occupational Safety and Health Administration certification course. About 176 students attended the course, which was broken into 10 one-hour classes relating to general safety issues. Each student who attended the complete course received an official OSHA certification, which units typically pay $1,600 per student to obtain.

Another 89 students attended the eight-hour hazardous waste operations refresher course, which is required by the Code of Federal Regulations for enlisted, officers and civilian people who work with hazardous waste.

These two courses alone play a big role in training and certifying people, Mr. Smith said. Combined with the 100 other courses, major commands are able to use the training symposium to meet their annual training requirements.

Air Combat Command alone is able to meet 35 to 40 percent of its annual training requirement using this one-week training symposium, Mr. Smith said. That means the command can train a large number of people over the course of one week instead of one year, lowering the training footprint on our wings.

Staff Sgt. Kristen Fiedler received her fair share of training during the event. The noncommissioned officer in-charge of bioenvironmental at Langley Air Force Base, Va., received 28 hours of instruction, and she said the weeks worth of training was very beneficial for her.

I was able to attend the top 10 courses I requested, she said. I also was enrolled in a number of other courses. I ended up learning some new things that I actually hadnt planned on learning about.

The NCOIC attended an asbestos awareness training course, which directly relates to her job and recertifies her in that particular area of her career field.

Its all a part of incorporating cost-effective and focused training to help define mission needs, said Mr. Smith.

We call it right fittraining. Our goal is to focus on the training needs of the supporting commands so we can give them a means to obtain the specific skills and knowledge they need to accomplish the mission, he said. Our focus is on the customer, and I feel like the training symposium was very successful in accomplishing that need this year.