Finding the Balance: Field Experience and Academic Professionalization in Emergency Management
- civiccoresolutions
- Oct 24, 2025
- 5 min read
By Tamara Croom Doss, MSHRM, CEM
CivicCore Solutions, Owner & Principal Consultant
Doctor of Science Student in Emergency Management
Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, Alabama
Emergency management is rapidly changing. The field is advancing in many ways yet drifting apart in others. As an Emergency Manager and a fourth-year doctoral student in Emergency Management, I am equally divided on both sides of the debate. Education should not be at the expense of experience, and we should continue to honor and value the men and women who work tirelessly day in and day out to serve in and lead our departments and organizations across the country. Experience is what built the foundation for our profession.
Academia in no way seeks to devalue or discredit the real-world, on-the-job experience that all practitioners have. Instead, it seeks to build upon it. A study is how we can better contextualize what works and what does not, why decisions are made, and the impact of those decisions on our operations and the public we serve. The study is also about how we can take our lessons learned in the field and make them quantifiable, so we can use data, policy, and strategy to influence decision-makers, shape preparedness and response efforts in the future, and, in the long term, save more lives. As such, education is an important way for us to quantify our successes, measure outcomes, and advocate for our communities and the resources they need to a wider audience.
We must ensure professionalization never undermines those who built this profession. The classroom and the command post are both important venues for developing and honing our leadership skills. We must pave a path forward that honors both experience and learning, encouraging seasoned practitioners to further their education and ensuring no hierarchy makes either a prerequisite for professional respect. If we truly want to professionalize the profession, we do so not through exclusion or singularity, but through inclusiveness, where the practitioner’s experience and the academic’s insight are not only seen but valued.
Experience in the field will always be the ultimate test. Practitioners build their expertise in the crucible of actual field operations. Seasoned professionals are irreplaceable, as they bring an unfathomable amount of knowledge and experience gained through years of real-world applications. They know how to adapt to fluid, changing situations, how to make do with limited resources, how to work in austere and often hostile environments, and how to make tough calls in an environment of uncertainty. Practitioners can also quickly assess situational needs, have an intuitive sense of human behavior and decision-making in disaster situations, and have an innate understanding of the political, logistical, and operational limitations that are often completely lost in theory.
Dippy’s (2022) theory of leadership development is not an either/or proposition. Instead, it is “recruitment, education, training, development, and experience” with field operations being the synthesis and applied end of the theory (p. 1). The future of this profession should never displace those with years of experience as the discipline’s lifeblood. Conversely, formal education is just as critical as field experience. Education provides the training, theory, and credentialing needed not only to advance the discipline’s perceived legitimacy but also to influence its future trajectory. Waugh and Sadiq (2011) found that higher education provides an added structure to the lessons learned in the field during emergency management practice, giving the profession a venue to synthesize individual experience into collective frameworks, data, and policy. Without a formal academic infrastructure to advance the practice of emergency management, this profession risks remaining reactive rather than strategic, with responses that remain stagnant rather than improve. By embedding theory and research into our training, we are able to not only understand the why behind our work but also the knowledge to design data-driven emergency management plans, evaluate our programs, and become effective local and state-level advocates for resources and policies.
Opposing each other achieves nothing. Experience and education should not be treated as two ends of a spectrum but rather as two sides of the same coin. Carey (2018) found that service- or experiential-based learning models can help operationalize classroom learning by providing students with an opportunity to directly apply theories to real-life projects in emergency management. As a result, many academic programs are already taking steps by offering internships, drills, and training exercises in emergency management for new professionals to not only develop their tactical skills on the ground but also become strategic thinkers with a firm operational understanding of the field.
If there is one way to start narrowing the gap between the practitioner and the academic, it is to continue building and growing this relationship. Farris and McCreight (2014) found that professional field experience is a crucial element for conducting academic research and that this feedback loop helps strengthen the relevance of the research and its application. Practitioners provide the academic researcher with raw data, including case studies, after-action reports, and on-the-ground operational insights, which the academic researcher can take and refine into quantified studies that can then be used to inform evidence-based practices and policies. In this way, academic study becomes useful to our profession by not creating distance between academics and practitioners, but instead by closing that gap by applying the lessons learned. Best of all, it allows for the lessons learned to be truly lessons applied.
In the end, striking a balance between experience and education will require humility and respect. Field professionals should not dismiss theory- and data-based research as impractical or irrelevant; instead, use these tools to continue growing and improving our knowledge base. Academics must actively engage practitioners through interviews and embed their insights into the operational realities of disaster response and recovery. We all work toward the same goal: to save lives, protect property, and make communities stronger. The future of emergency management as a discipline hangs in the balance: a profession built on the real-world experiences of the field and bolstered by the rigor and methods of academic scholarship.
The future of emergency management should be the driving force behind our profession's growth. As we move forward into the future of this profession, we must start to work to bridge the divide between academics and practitioners. We cannot create a professional ceiling or make either classroom or command post experiences the singular defining experience of professionalism. Professionalism is not just knowing what to do; it is knowing why it matters.
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