A person who wants to become an emergency manager often considers enrolling in an emergency management program that has a broad base of courses that are applicable to numerous job roles. The concept of emergency management is not new, but the function has been updated since the days when it was simply known as disaster preparedness. Today’s emergency management activities involve crisis prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery, and employment opportunities for trained professionals extend into international markets as disasters can strike anywhere in the world. While emergency management certification has become a popular option for experienced professionals who want to demonstrate their job competence and enhance their career opportunities, obtaining a quality degree in the subject is the traditional way that emergency management practitioners enter the career field. Here are some of the course topics that students can expect to take when participating in a degree program for emergency management.
Examination of Critical Infrastructure
Risk management is an important activity within the field of emergency management. It is especially useful for managers who are helping their communities to identify potential disasters and to plan for reducing the impacts of those disasters on the delivery of vital goods and services. This usually involves identifying the critical infrastructure of communities, states or regions. Examples of critical infrastructure are hospitals with emergency facilities, power grids, communication systems and transportation routes for food distribution. A course that examines critical infrastructure exposes students to the methods for evaluating vulnerability levels of critical infrastructure and the industry standard ways to plan for vital asset protection.
Exercise Development and Review
Emergency managers do not just rely on theory and case study evaluation alone to prepare for their roles. Many crisis management professionals conduct exercises to train their organizations about disaster response, and they use the results of some role playing exercises to refine their plans for emergency preparedness, mitigation and response. A course in emergency management exercise development allows students to learn how to construct realistic exercises that are based on predetermined objectives. These students are sometimes exposed to sophisticated modeling and simulation tools in addition to industry best practices while learning how to plan, design and review emergency management exercises.
Public Relations and the Media
One of the main objectives of many emergency management degree programs is to train students to be leaders in the career field. A course that is greatly needed by emergency management leadership is one that emphasizes the appropriate way to address the public and the media prior to, during and after a disaster. A course in public relations and the media helps students to know how to engage the public in preparedness efforts without causing mass hysteria. It also exposes students to the proper ways to represent their organizations for media interviews and written correspondence.
Economic Impacts of Disaster
Natural and human caused emergencies often have detrimental impacts on a region’s economy depending on the intensity levels of the events. A course that exposes students to the economic impacts of disasters helps them to understand the potential costs that markets incur when disasters strike. The results of this analysis can be applied to policy planning efforts in domestic and international markets.
Conclusion
Emergency management degree graduates have numerous opportunities available to them with public, private and non-profit agencies. They can serve in a department that participates in all phases of emergency management, or they can choose to pursue an emergency management specialty area of interest like emergency response. The courses taught in a typical emergency management program utilize standards based theory and analysis of real world scenarios to prepare graduates for crisis management leadership roles.