Emergency Management is not yet a profession, but is traversing the pathway towards recognition as a profession in its own right. The future emergency management workforce faces the need to develop the knowledge, skills and abilities of participants in a way that blends academia and practice, standards and ethics, professional bodies and a body of knowledge. The future must recognise the roles of volunteer and career staff. The Human Capacities of the individual need to be identified, developed and nurtured through a program that will ensure that the future emergency manager has the range of skills required to not only build their capabilities to prevent, prepare, respond to and recover from emergency events, but to also sustain the people throughout a career full of emergency situations.

The pathway to be negotiated in this journey of professionalisation is complex, however when broken down consists of a range of attainable tasks and achievements. Defining and describing both the end point of professionalisation and the constituent parts allows a range of achievable tasks and projects to be undertaken. These transformative tasks and achievements can be undertaken by the entire emergency management industry and by the individuals that will continue to provide the emergency management service.

This presentation will describe the process of professionalisation that underpins the building and sustainment of the emergency management workforce. Breaking the process into a range of key tasks will allow the application of current research to support and assist the development of the individual career and volunteer staff as they traverse the pathways of academia and practice, building and applying professional standards, developing their own leadership skills and those of the people around them, while also achieve a range of certification milestones.