Brio has been working with the Pacific Community in the Disaster Risk Management training space now for a few years.
We have been working with the PIEMA team (Pacific Islands Emergency Management Alliance).
This has been an amazing experience for us, from both an industry skills and training skills perspective.
The Pacific Island faces many issues that we also know of in Australia when it comes to developing and delivering training – people who are geographically dispersed, challenged by expensive or unreliable internet, with different education levels, that include volunteers and paid positions, and who are balancing family/work/disasters on a day to day basis. At a regional perspective, there are 14 different Pacific Island Countries, with different resources, legislation, processes and different risk focus areas.
The aims of PIEMA are to build better collaboration, strengthen communication and ultimately increase effectiveness when responding to disasters across all of these countries. PIEMA is seeking to create TRUST, LEADERSHIP and TEAMWORK.
We think this has been echoed in the team approach between PIEMA and Brio in developing, reviewing and testing of training products.
TRUST
Like all new relationships, we had to learn how each other works, what the expectations were and how to get things done while navigating different groups and systems. Having the input of people working in the Pacific Region was invaluable in this process, with the personal connections and calls/emails to key players helping many tasks be reviewed and approved in timeframes required. We were able to build trust through consistent behaviours and processes, and by having a clear work plan.
TEAMWORK
The willingness on both sides to get together online, discuss issues, brainstorm solutions and to contribute to the review process was crucial to ensuring the end product would meet the needs of the people it targeted. Being able to merge the knowledge of subject matter experts from the Pacific Region with subject matter experts from Australia and elsewhere led to the inclusion of contemporary concepts that were contextualised for the Pacific. Instructional design skills helped make this content digestible for the target learners.
As a result of this teamwork, we have had the joy of seeing a large number of e-learning modules, a Certificate IV in DRM (team Leadership) and a number of micro-qualifications come to life. We have had the privilege of hearing how different people across different islands are taking and implementing training and the skills gained from it. We have been excited to see how gender diversity and empowerment is incorporated and is growing through targeted actions in this training space.
LEADERSHIP
Leaders exist at many levels and in different contexts. From the Pacific, we were graced with leadership support from higher levels of the SPC organisation. This support to the program was invaluable. We had a PIEMA Project Lead who provided the long term and large scale vision within which different work was completed. Having this long term view of what was being developed helped ensure everything would build on each other and meet the aims of PIEMA. Having a dedicated PIEMA Project Officer as our day-to-day contact person (who could take the lead and make decisions to get project tasks moving and approved) made everything so much easier. They provided practical support. Without this leadership, the projects could easily have drifted away in time and space. And within the Brio team, having leaders in both the instructional design space and Pacific Competency Model/Compliance space meant that different tasks could be lead with confidence and efficiency.
PIEMA has now entered their Phase 2 of the project, which will continue to build training pathways for people across the region. We are so excited to see what comes next! While we know there will be new people to work with in the next phase, we are glad for the relationships made so far, who will all remain an important part of our EM/DRM Network.
You can read more about PIEMA here:
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