Employment Testing for Firefighters

In the United States, vocations within the public safety sector often require Industrial and Organizational Psychology employment testing for initial employment and advancement throughout the ranks.

These include such professionals as firefighters, sheriffs and police officers, correctional officers, emergency medical services personnel including emergency medical technicians.

NFSI/IOS

The IOS National Firefighter Selection Inventory practice test, an entry-level examination, was developed as an alternative to conventional firefighter written entrance examinations.

It was developed by IOS, Inc. (Industrial/Organizational Solutions). Afterwards,  psychological testing became a standard practice done by many fire departments throughout the United States.

This screening IOS National Firefighter Selection Inventory practice test aims to focus on the cognitive skills and the behavioral characteristics of candidate examinees.

The test

The IOS National Firefighter Selection Inventory practice test has been shown to accurately predict the capacity and willingness of the candidates to succeed as firefighters.

Also, the NFSI is well-suited to predict the success all entry-level firefighter positions. The tests are all in strict compliance with all federal, state and local testing guidelines and regulations.

Here are the sections and the format.

Cognitive Skills

This section is made up of 105 questions spread out in over 8 different areas.

In Verbal Comprehension, the measurement is on your ability to read a scenario and what took place. The job-related passages are long with questions and alternative responses. The items involve information, analysis or conclusions from the scenario.

Verbal expression assesses your ability in bringing ideas through language, the highlights are on capitalization, vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, and English use. Select the (underlined) correct alternatives and select those spelled incorrectly.

In Problem sensitivity, you are tested for the ability to recognize a problem or the most serious problem through questions requiring you to identify the difficulty in a given scenario.

There are questions in Deductive reasoning that assesses this skill requiring the application of a rule or procedure to a set of circumstances.

Inductive reasoning presents a set of events or objects to the examinee. The task is to determine the rule or the connection that exists between the set’s individual elements. You will be asked to draw conclusions, or find the connecting link.

In Information ordering, the rules or procedures are provided. Apply them to statements to correctly sequence the sentences. The questions require the selection of the procedure to attend to first/last and sequencing of all statements, and selecting the alternative correct sentence sequence.

Mathematical reasoning includes encounter charts, tables, diagrams, pictures and math word problems. You carry out basic mathematical functions to answer the questions using the information in the charts.

In Number facility, the examinee calculate answers to mathematical word problems using fundamental math functions such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentages, ratios, decimals, averaging and square measures.

Personality Attributes

This has 50 multiple-choice, five-point rating scale questions. The rating is from “Strongly Agree” to Strongly Disagree.”

Like the other pre-employment personality tests, your choices will reflect your thoughts, actions and preferences in regards to work-based characteristics. The main characteristics assessed include stress tolerance (handling extreme work pressures), team orientation (essential characteristic), and motivation/attitude (main traits that establish outstanding of firefighters).