 Welcome to part two of a four-part series focusing on the CFA Recruit course. Recruits are from many different backgrounds, including current CFA volunteers and come from all over the state of Victoria. Operations Officer Chris Bingham, along with some instructors and recruits from the CFA Recruit course, will take you through what happens in the 18-week course. It's really important that firefighters know their role. So the exams that are required to be undertaken through the Recruit course are a testing of the retention of knowledge. And there's quite a number of different aspects that get taught throughout the Recruit course. And the exams are designed to allow consistent development and retention of that knowledge right throughout the Recruit course. So rather than just wait and have a mid-course exam and then a end-of-course exam, we much rather provide smaller exams and a more regular interval so the recruits have much more opportunity in being successful. There's 10 exams and they're spaced out. They sort of start around about the week four mark and sort of continue on right through to the week 16. Generally, you have one exam per week. There is the odd time where you do have a bit of a break in between. But you have 10 exams structured right throughout the course, including eight assignments. The behaviours that we really like to see on the course is very much about comradeship. It's about working as a team. It's about trust, ensuring trust in each other. It's about reliance on each other. And there's a very good reason for that. Everything we do in the fire service, we do as a team. Now individual actions are only individual actions to assist the team development. So it's all about the growth, the development, the working of the team to achieve an outcome. The behaviours we look for are what we want to see on the fire station. Teamwork, crews have a good peak physical fitness, crews that are able to problem solve some mechanical reasoning side things, and good communication skills. They're the main things we're looking for from a recruit. But obviously too, honesty is another big one as well. They're the things we know that if we can make them work here on the recruit course, when the recruits get on the station, they'll fit right into the team environment that's there waiting for them. Coming into the course, I realised it was going to be hard, but I didn't realise how hard it would be and how physically demanding it would be and how relentless it is, especially after sort of halfway where you're doing drill after drill after drill and you've really got to be fit. You have a vast range of people here. Some people are really good physically, some people are really good theoretically and it's good to have that mix and the good thing about it is that if some of us got some issues, then we've got 29 other people to give us a hand. The most challenging aspect of the course for me has been mixing the physical activity with family life. The course itself, I think it's all very achievable, but it's getting that balance right because you need to be fit. You also need to be able to fit you with a family. You need to be able to help them out when they need help and be there. Maintaining fitness is very important right throughout the recruit course, so the current entry requirements is 9.6 on the beep test and we currently do the beep test throughout the recruit course. Also, the challenge test is done multiple times throughout the recruit course, so it's really important to maintain that physical fitness out of hours as well. The biggest challenge for myself is coming from a desk job to a job that's actually quite physically demanding, not only physically demanding, but in areas that I am not used to. So we're learning how to hose bowl and sink hydrants. It's really quite outside my league, but once you work on your fitness, make sure you've got yourself up to scratch. You're able to tackle that with the knowledge of technique and what you're doing.