National Fire Protection Association Reviews

Every year (now going on six consecutive years in a row) senior leadership brings in new and talented people to help them change the association and find new revenue avenues to support the mission. And every year they don't listen to any suggestions from their new hires which ultimately leads to a year or few years (if your lucky) of complete frustration only to be fired (helped transition out as they put it) around October as an early Christmas present. All so senior leadership can improve the budget forecast before the November board meeting and hide the fact they spent thousands of dollars hiring folks only to not listen to them and have nothing to show for the money invested. If you end up going for one of the new positions centered around changing elements of NFPA, be warned you may get paid well but you are on borrowed time from the beginning. Those roles might benefit you if you are looking for a stop gap while exploring other opportunities but there is no longevity associated with them. Just something to be aware of if you are moving or buying a house because of the opportunity. Also the codes and standards department talks about change but has no interest in actually making any degree of meaningful change. Essentially just plays a game of musical chairs with job positions and titles to basically justify absorbing positions while adding more work. Then complains about staff not doing there job and being the cause of a drop in quality. For about a year they actually had an excel spread sheet of what they view as peoples mistakes and would use it as a metaphorical bat to criticize staff. It didn't record a single thing that was done right or any accomplishments. So if something was 99.9% correct, there would be a discussion about the 0.1%. If you are going for a job at NFPA stay as far away from codes and standards as possible. Its the anchor holding back a lot of change and it likes to point the finger at its own staff who are ignored to begin with. That arm of the association is the kind of place where when you are told to do something make sure you get in writing because you will be asked "how did we end up here" three to four weeks later by the same people that told you to do it.

When I came into the organization, they promised the world. I really believed in the mission. Then new senior leadership took over, and the ship has sunk. Instead of working towards our mission, they’re working towards building more red tape, and nitpicking on the .01%, so with that, all good employees have left. They are forgetting the real purpose... save the world, but not save your employees. Doesn’t make any sense. You don’t staff appropriately, especially projects. Try to save a buck, at the sake of driving everyone to the brink of insanity by burning everyone out to the maximum, and then scolding them for forgetting to do one little thing or not doing it as awesome as the scolder would, even though that person has done the remaining 1 million other things right. You tell us to be bold, and when we make any sort of decisions, and the unexpected happens... you put us to blame, blame the employees who believe in the NFPA’s mission, who work day in and day out to push our mission forward, and then do everything you can to make us feel bad until we finally leave the organization.