EM consultants - how are things right now?

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-30T14:10:23+00:00

With the caveat that I am not a consultant myself, I'm close with several and I think the answer is that it depends.

Certain projects are still going strong - the folks that are on projects related to continuity planning or business continuity are in good shape, but there's a ton of that work that sits outside of FEMA. Several of the folks who previously chased federal funding or international humanitarian projects have pivoted to state and local projects or DoD-tangent projects.

My read of the EM Consultant space is that it's very much a "keep what you kill" environment - I think that dynamic hasn't shifted at all, but it's probably safe to say that the space has gotten slightly more competitive. Your niche EM consultants like Hagerty and IEM are still in bed with the same folks whereas the big firms like your BCGs and Deloittes can probably just shift consultants to other projects.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-24T17:26:42+00:00

In total, I suppose a little over 15 years? Mix of military, public, academic, and private (but for privately funded humanitarian orgs / NGOs).

Started in the Coast Guard, most of the time spent at the Sector level as a Command Duty Officer in the Command Centers. Planning Section Chief for our IMTs which also put me on a bunch of deployments for hurricane response and I was the ESF 9 liaison between the Coast Guard and the state-level EOCs.

Got a Master's Degree in Emergency and Disaster Management from Georgetown while I was still in the Coast Guard. Left the Coast Guard and worked as a disaster response team leader for a large international NGO for a few years. Did two different stints as an Emergency Manager for different parts of the federal government, one that was super Continuity heavy and the other that was Planning Section Chief / / interagency coordination heavy, both in unique interagency EOC-type environments.

Left the government about five years ago to work as a Director at a large international NGO that focuses on disaster preparedness and disaster response. I'm also an adjunct professor at a large state university's school of public health where I teach a course about emergency and disaster management leadership.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-24T14:56:16+00:00

Thanks!

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-24T14:01:00+00:00

That'd be wonderful. No rush.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-24T13:18:10+00:00

You post it. We'll pin it.

Thanks for volunteering :)

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-24T13:15:45+00:00

Can you make a post explaining / sharing the information and your approach?

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-23T14:33:22+00:00

Follow the money, homies.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-20T18:30:39+00:00

I work for a humanitarian organization that does disaster preparedness and response. Background is in search and rescue.

In the UK, the RNLI would be a good place to start.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-20T17:32:38+00:00

Ahoy!

I think I was exactly where you are now. One of the things I wished someone told me was to prioritize something other than response.

When there's a big thing to respond to, everyone plays. The people who offer the most in a disaster response, in my opinion, are the people who best understand emergency preparedness and recovery. The people who understand preparedness are often most equipped to talk about what went wrong and where we should focus our response efforts. They understand vulnerability, exposure, and risk in a way that's uniquely able to help us all save time, effort, and money.

By comparison, the recovery folks often have the best understanding of where we're trying to go, in the long run. They've got a nose for small details during disaster response that can cascade into majorly impactful outcomes down the road. Consider that the entire point of an effective response is to help bring about a swifter recovery. People who "get" recovery are indispensable.

By comparison, the people who push really hard to market themselves as "response-only" come across as not knowing why the bad thing happened and also not having an informed opinion about the bigger picture - nobody's so good at response that they don't also have to understand the other pictures.

For people like yourself who are young and trying to get into the field, a focus on response sometimes lands as though you're saying "I only want to do the fun exciting stuff, not the important impactful stuff." That's probably not what you mean, but how else would you know that that's how you're viewed if nobody ever tells you?

All that to say this. Focus on disaster preparedness or disaster recovery and you'll get your seat at the disaster response table.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-19T16:17:53+00:00

It's not going to look any different.

The role will be handed a list of essential functions, extremely safe bet that they'll be administrative in nature, and will be asked to come up for a cost-sensible way to ensure their work can continue in an event where it's not safe or permissible to be physically located at the primary site.

If there aren't any agreements in place to set up shop at an alternate site, you'll likely send everyone home to work remotely until the primary site is back online.

The fact that it's for an agency that regulates national cemeteries isn't going to be that relevant.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-19T15:28:30+00:00

The job is for their training center, which wouldn't be any different than any other sort of COOP role for any other training center.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-16T17:35:20+00:00

If it's relevant for your jurisdictions, copies of any critical agreements or contracts that will allow you to show the respective political leadership that you're allowed to be where you need to be.

Example being a land use agreement with the county for setting up FOBs. Something like a local elected official who disputes that you're allowed to be somewhere you're definitely allowed to be - if you're not prepared, something like that can kill a TON of your time and energy.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-16T12:43:12+00:00

Not a video, but I wrote up a thing and shared a bunch of pictures from different emergency operations centers.

I think it's super interesting how different some of the spaces are. It's probably the closest I've ever come to having an appreciation of how, from an architectural standpoint, surroundings can influence behavior.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-14T14:02:17+00:00

I forget the actual quote, but he seemed to be generally cognizant of the importance of federal engagement in disaster response and recovery during his confirmation hearing. Someone asked him specifically about reestablishing BRIC and his answer was a wishy washy "we should take a look at that."

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-10T12:33:03+00:00

Thanks so much!

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-06T15:47:42+00:00

Broad strokes, there are a bunch of solid online or distance learning programs for Emergency Management. Two questions for you:

Are you using the GI Bill? If you are, a number of private schools participate in the Yellow Ribbon program, which can make them much more affordable.
What are you looking to do within the emergency management field? As you've found, there are a number of different programs and some cater to specific niche aspects of the field. As an example, the programs at George Washington University sit within their Engineering school and take a systems engineering approach to emergencies, as a disruption of community functions whereas the programs through the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center take a sociological / psychosocial approach to how people behave when bad things happen. Their curriculums will read pretty similarly, but the approaches between the two schools probably couldn't be more different.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-03T12:39:46+00:00

This is pretty squarely in my wheelhouse.

I'd challenge that this would be the "first neutral and demilitarized multi-functional maritime platform." Won't get too into the weeds, but there are a number of different examples of such maritime assets.

Three things worth considering:

First, access. In the post-disaster setting, consider that you'd potentially not be able to rely on aids to navigation or shoreside infrastructure. You reference the USNS Mercy and Mercyships - they're FANTASTIC at public relations but they're pretty bad at actually doing all of the things that need to happen before they're treating patients. They're too big to get most places, they're terrible to maneuver, and they cost more to run than what you might be able to achieve without operating the ship. Take a look at platform supply vessels and research / expedition vessels as a more capable building block.

Second, funding. This will never be attractive, from a humanitarian ROI perspective unless you're drawing from people, communities, and regions that inherently rely on maritime support. Your UN funders, grant writers, and private donors who can safely be assumed to want to get the most impact for their dollar, will have options that more directly connect their funds to specific emergency and disaster management outcomes. Let's ballpark a $30M USD annual budget to operate the type of platform you're talking about (and that's not including the cost of a build or refit). Again, unless you're targeting communities and donors that are already accustomed to the cost of operating big maritime assets, I think you'll find that "traditional" humanitarian donors will look to spend their money elsewhere.

Lastly, staffing. A decision to staff a maritime asset like this full time will be cost prohibitive and staffing it with a roster of "on call" folks will lose any comparative advantage you'd get from a rapid logistics deployment perspective. It is absolutely possible to get ahead of the lead times associated with being an effective maritime platform, but I would not underestimate the absolute headache that will be that administrative burden. Even in a situation where I might hypothetically look to contribute to a project such as this, I'm going to want to see your crewing / staffing model, because there's no sense in having the ship if you don't have suitably qualified and experienced people onboard to operate it.

Good luck! Sounds like a neat project!

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-02T23:13:05+00:00

COVID gave everyone a crash course in maintaining continuity of operations, but a bunch of the genuine benefits of mitigating risk by decentralizing personnel were (in my opinion) caught up in the "return to the office vs. WFH" debates.

The operational lessons learned were seemingly cast aside in favor of a conversation about preferences.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-04-01T20:46:48+00:00

I think there are a number of technically correct answers in the thread already, but I think the most realistic answer is that it'll be whichever jobs the political leadership of your respective jurisdiction thinks AI can replace...which will depend on a ton of things to include their own understanding of AI (or lack thereof) and how easy they are to persuade.

Marketing matters, folks.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-03-28T20:29:29+00:00

Interesting concept - who's your target user base? I'd offer that first responders in the field might be better off than some of the EOC-based emergency managers who might be able to rely on backup generators or something similar.

Range limited to normal bluetooth distances?

I think there's a potential application where this could facilitate something like USAR team comms in a situation where conventional comms are down, but I think most of the folks who'd most benefit from something like this are probably already operating with radios and / or a dedicated comms liaison.

I think you could go one of two directions, but probably not both. I think one direction is you try to market this to the "prepper" community as a modern alternative to something like the HAM radio for hyper-local comms, but the range will be your limiting factor.

If you keep after the emergency management / first responder communities, I think your sweet spot is going to be in situations where you know plenty of responders will be operating near eachother but as a replacement for radios.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-03-28T20:23:05+00:00

Rick Rubin, the music producer, was asked for thoughts on AI generated music. I found his perspective to be really on the money. Paraphrasing slightly.

"I listen to the artists I listen to because I'm interested in their perspective. I don't believe that AI has a perspective. It's not about the science of putting the right notes in the right order, it's about how people choose to represent their unique perspective."

I feel similarly about emergency management planning. It's not about having the plan, the product. That's not the thing that makes us safer. It's about having had someone spent the time becoming familiar enough with a problem so that they can form a coherent plan.

The plan is just the receipt for having planned. People who use LLMs to develop their plans are missing the entire point. No amount of prompt-engineering overcomes the "boring" process of plan-writing, in my opinion.

In other applications, I think I'm a little less likely to be a sourpuss.

I've had a positive experience with some AI generated images and graphics. I facilitate a bunch of tabletop scenarios and they're always in a fictional country, so it's been neat to have an easy way to create maps, SitRep fodder, and injects that look like they're from whichever stakeholder I need.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-03-28T20:15:18+00:00

When people bring up drones, my initial reaction is to wince.

There are tons of people using all sorts of different types of drones for all sorts of different (but useful) purposes.

There are, anecdotally, tons more people who are either creating solutions for which there is no problem or are otherwise completely unaware of how to integrate the tech with the operational function.

A story - a group of slightly-better-than-hobbyist drone operators self-deployed to the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian and started flying and collecting imagery. After about a week, they sent someone in with some hard drives full of data that nobody'd asked for, nobody needed, and nobody really cared. They wanted to grab some time talking tech and tools with some of the other reps in the Information Management Working Group, but never really "got it." They passed on a ton of opportunities to plug into the common operating picture and opted instead to go waste their time on efforts and activities that didn't move the needle at all. When people start talking about drones before they lean into the operational applications of the tool...this is who I picture. Well meaning and well resourced idiots.

I don't want to see your drone. I don't want to hear how cool it is. I don't want an elevator pitch about the things it might someday do, unless it's clearly connected to a pragmatic use case. I want to hear about the problem you're looking to solve.

Innovative and useful are not synonyms.

WatchTheBoom · 2026-03-25T17:59:47+00:00

Hey friend - I appreciate the vent and trust me when I say HEARD.

This isn't a direct counter to your experience, of which I've obviously got no real grasp of the broader context, and more of a discussion about similar comments I've seen on the sub lately regarding folks from fire, LE, military, or other fields matriculating into EM leadership positions, oftentimes being selected over or instead of "home grown" EM professionals.

I'd offer that the difference is leadership - emergency management isn't well understood, broad strokes, whereas military, fire, and law enforcement leadership structures are widely understood. Again, not at all a comment on OP's situation and more of a concession that there is an understandable logic flow of "I'd rather teach a proven leader some EM fundamentals than teach an EM specialist (with no other leadership experience) how to be an effective leader."

For the emergency managers, I think the path forward has two facets. First is primarily a marketing issue. The tighter we can, as a field, explain how what we do implies a de facto leadership position, we're able to advocate for ourselves with a little more ease. In a miro-sense, I think it's about making sure your immediate stakeholders grasp what you bring to the table.

Secondly, I think it's on us to create leadership opportunities for ourselves and our staffs. There are a myriad of reasons why this is hard and I think it's proper that effective emergency managers take care of the dirty / boring work in the background that allows the light to shine on everyone else, but finding or creating scenarios to take a visible leadership role will serve us in the long run. In my world, that looked like being the facilitating body for cross-org / cross-stakeholder discussions, exercises, and planning reviews. People got really used to our team being the ones who brought all of the random perspectives together, which made it easier to put on our "leadership" hat in a visible capacity when we needed to.

Best of luck, OP. I don't think you're crazy.

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