Every PSAP in the country tracks training hours. It's a compliance requirement. It's a metric your accrediting body wants to see. It's the number that shows up in your annual report.
It is also, by itself, almost entirely meaningless as a measure of dispatcher readiness.
I've watched centers log 40 hours of annual dispatch training per telecommunicator and still fall apart on their first structure fire with entrapment. I've watched centers that barely hit their minimums handle a mass casualty with precision because the 12 hours they did spend were on the right things.
The difference isn't volume. It's specificity.
The problem with generic dispatch training programs
Most in-service training gets built by whoever drew the short straw that month. A supervisor pulls something off the internet, maybe a news article about a big incident, maybe a refresher on a policy nobody reads. The dispatchers sit through it. The box gets checked. Everyone moves on.
Nobody asks the question that actually matters: what call is going to walk through the door next week that my team isn't ready for?
That question requires you to know your jurisdiction. Not in the abstract. Specifically. What infrastructure sits in your response area? What seasonal risks change your call volume? What mutual aid agreements have your people never actually exercised? What types of calls generate the most corrective actions in QA?
The answers to those questions are your PSAP training program curriculum. Everything else is filler.
What dispatcher readiness actually looks like
A dispatcher who has thought through a dam failure notification chain before the weather service issues the flash flood warning is ready. A dispatcher who has never seen their center's EAP binder is not. It doesn't matter how many hours of active shooter training they sat through if the dam is the thing that breaks.
Readiness is the gap between what your team has practiced and what your jurisdiction can produce. Every comm center has gaps. Most centers don't know where theirs are because nobody's done the audit.
The training audit nobody does
Pull your last two years of QA data. Pull your incident types. Pull your EAPs. Lay them side by side with your training calendar.
Where the training calendar doesn't touch the incident data, you have a gap. Where the EAPs have never been trained on, you have a gap. Where QA keeps flagging the same error pattern, you have a gap.
Those gaps are the only training that matters. Fill them first. Then worry about your hours.
The Before the Call exercise library was built to fill exactly these kinds of gaps - real incidents, dispatch perspective, ready to run as a shift briefing tonight. 44 exercises covering mass casualty, infrastructure, multi-jurisdictional coordination, and more.