The Connecticut Fire Academy Streamlines Training Operations with Acadis

The Connecticut Fire Academy (CFA) delivers over 400 training classes each year, supporting 33 different certifications for everyone from new recruits to chief officers across the state.

Offering everything from single-day to multiple-day classes and a 15-week recruit program, CFA hosts about 20% of these programs on campus, with the remainder delivered at host sites throughout Connecticut.

CFA recognized its complex operations required a greater need for modern infrastructure to support training, certification, and instructor coordination.

Manual Processes and Siloed Systems Created Bottlenecks

Before selecting the Acadis Readiness Suite to modernize academy operations, CFA relied on paper-based registration forms and manual eligibility checks. Two full-time staff were dedicated solely to class registration and close-outs. The Academy built a homegrown electronic system, but it was difficult to use and inefficient.

Some of CFA’s critical academy operations challenges included:

• Class registration was tedious – “We were still accepting credit card forms and forms to register for classes by fax,” the Director of Training said. “Everything was manually entered—it was extremely convoluted.”
• Validating eligibility was time-consuming – “Our training and certification registrars had to manually review each file to make sure that the student met the prerequisites for a specific class or to sit for a test.”
• Retrieving records was cumbersome – “If I got an FOI request for a class from five or ten years ago, we’d have to grab a 20-foot ladder and crawl through cardboard boxes filled with dust and hope everything we needed was there.”

Digitizing Workflows Improves Efficiency and Compliance

With Acadis, CFA was able to replace outdated processes and systems with a unified platform that automates registration, prerequisite checks, form routing, and records management.

“Now, if you need a correction for a specific class, boom—it’s part of the registration process,” said the Director of Training. “If I get a FOI request now, it’s easy. Everything is in one package.”

Key improvements CFA experienced by adopting Acadis include:

• Automating instructor and student registration workflows, including required approvals.
• Digitizing prerequisite verification to ensure compliance meets certification standards.
• Centralizing and digitizing class records for faster, more reliable audit response.
• Freeing up staff capacity to focus on strategic training initiatives.

While the Academy still relies on its certification division to double-check records to ensure accreditation requirements are met, Acadis handles the bulk of the process.

“Just the man-hours Acadis has saved us—I can’t even begin to estimate,” the Director of Training shared.

Expansion Possibilities Made Possible with Acadis

Because Acadis is highly configurable, scalable, and always evolving, the Connecticut Fire Academy is considering other areas where Acadis can help simplify operations:

• In Connecticut, the certification and training divisions are completely separate, but the state is working towards leveraging Acadis’ Testing module to support certification testing in the future.
• The Academy is partnering with the Connecticut USAR team to leverage Acadis to help manage its training and training records.
• Collaborate with the Connecticut Police Academy, which will also be using Acadis to streamline its operations.

“Connecticut Fire Academy, the Connecticut Police Academy, and Connecticut USAR will all be leveraging Acadis, and hopefully, we can get the Connecticut State Police on board down the road,” the Director of Training shared. “And then public safety in Connecticut will all be trained and managed through one database. There’s value in that, that I probably don’t even realize.”