Wednesday, September 30, 2026 | 2pm-3pm ET
Most agencies today are still running an FTO program built on a design from the 1970s — the San Jose Model. It’s been patched, updated, and “modernized” more times than anyone can count, but the core design hasn’t changed in 50 years. If this were SWAT or firearms training, agencies wouldn’t tolerate technology and technique standing still for five decades. So why has FTO been the exception?
In this session, Dan Greene (Executive Director, NAFTO), Jason Devlin (creator of the NextGen FTO model), and Dr. Bob Jenson Associate Professor at Point University, will make the case for rethinking field training from the ground up as a real developmental process for building the best officer possible. They’ll walk through what a 21st-century FTO model looks like, the research behind it, and what it takes to bring this kind of change back to your own agency.
You’ll Learn:
- Why the San Jose Model’s design hasn’t kept pace with how adults actually learn
- What a flexible, adult-learning-based FTO model looks like in practice
- How agencies using the NextGen model rate its impact on resilience, paperwork burden, and problem-solving compared to legacy programs
- Why ongoing outside training is critical to keep your program evolving
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