Polk Counyy Driver Engineer Openings

[mikelinkins]

Polk County Fire Rescue has nine (9) Driver Engineer openings. Per the bargaining agreement, internal candidates get preference, but there is a strong possibility that we will be hiring some positions from the outside. We just promoted lieutenants and four of them came from the outside.

The job posting is available here: http://www.polk-county.net/county_of...obs/10230.aspx

The department's website is here: Http://www.polk-county.net/fire

Starting salary is posted at 12.13hr / 35,322.56 yr

You must apply on-line and the jobs close on 2/22/2008.

We are an MSBU (non-property tax) funded department that has been and will continue to grow. We just had our 10 year business plan blessed by our commissioners and we are upgrading our engines to ALS at a rate of about two per year.

Please take a good, hard look at being a part of our team!

[timjtitus]

another thing Chief, is that on October 1 DE's will get another 12.5% raise bringing the base to 39,738 and the top out to 60,047.

[jefferson136]

I'am a Firefighter/Paramedic in Illinois. I have 3 1/2 years career and 8 years volunteer exp.. My wife has family in the Haines City area and I was just down there on vacation and visited one of your stationS. My question is does an applicant have to have florida cert's before applying or can a canidate be considered with out of state certs. My wife wants to move somewhere warmer than Illinois.

[mikelinkins]

Good question, but sorry, you must already be Florida certified.

[Firemedic 61]

Per the bargaining agreement, internal candidates get preference, but there is a strong possibility that we will be hiring some positions from the outside. We just promoted lieutenants and four of them came from the outside.

I'll bet that went over like a fart in church! Seriously, were their not enough qualified people? That I can understand but, to hire for a promoted position within the bargaining unit from another dept, moral must be just peachy.

[mikelinkins]

I'll bet that went over like a fart in church! Seriously, were their not enough qualified people? That I can understand but, to hire for a promoted position within the bargaining unit from another dept, moral must be just peachy.

Actually, morale is quite good right now. The reason that we have to go outside is that we have grown so much, so fast that we exhausted all of our internal candidates. The alternative was to leave these newly approved positions vacant for a year or more to wait until our other internal candidates became qualified. We thought that if we did that, we would have a hard time justifying more people in the future, not to mention that we were finally able up upgrade from two person engines to three at our five remaining stations that were still staffed with two and we did not want to hold off on that long overdue upgrade.

We are teaching many of the necessary classes need for promotion in-house, for free on a shift friendly basis and our people are responding and getting their training. Our problem is that we cannot generate enough people to fill the need fast enough.

Ask around, I think you will find that our people are pretty happy overall.

[PCFDENG2651]

Sorry posted the same thing twice.

[PCFDENG2651]

Chief Linkins is correct.Morale in our dept. is very high and only getting better. PCFD is pulling applicants from all over for any position that is ever posted. I think in the last year PCFD has seen record numbers for applicants in any job posted. I have been with PCFD including my volunteer years for almost 13 years and our dept. has come a long way and continues to still grow and progress. Chief Cash and other admininstrative chiefs have worked very hard to get us where we are today and continue to work hard every day for our future and I am very proud to be a member of our dept. The goals that our dept. has reached and have set for the future are very high standards for our citizens and the citizens are what counts. In my opinion Polk County citizens are very lucky to have the services that our dept. has to offer and will only continue to improve. I can definately say I will not be looking for greener grasses......