Emergency Services Workforce 2030: Changing landscape literature review

Abstract

The Changing Landscape Literature Review collates a high-level evidence base around seven major themes in the changing landscape (i.e., the external environment) that fire, emergency service, and rural land management agencies operate in, and which will shape workforce planning and capability requirements over the next decade. It is an output of the Workforce 2030 project and is one of two literature reviews that summarise the research base underpinning a high-level integrative report of emerging workforce challenges and opportunities, Emergency Services Workforce 2030.

Workforce 2030 aimed to highlight major trends and developments likely to impact the future workforces of emergency service organisations, and their potential implications. The starting point for the project was a question:

What can research from outside the sphere of emergency management add to our knowledge of wider trends and developments likely to shape the future emergency services workforce, and their implications?

The seven themes included in the Changing Landscape Literature Review are: 1) demographic changes, 2) changing nature of work, 3) changes in volunteering, 4) physical technology, 5) digital technology, 6) shifting expectations, and changing risk. A second, accompanying literature review, the Changing Work Literature Review, focuses on another nine themes related to emergency service organisation’s internal workforce management approaches and working environments.