The National Commissioner Task Force has updated the BSA Commissioner Training website with all-new training materials.

Commissioners now have more resources for training than ever before. A Council Commissioner Basic Training course is in process and the manual update for the Commissioner College is just about done. Both will be posted when they are available.

Goals for Basic Training were to:

1. Make it possible to field a new commissioner as soon as reasonably possible after accepting the position. Now, one Basic Training is all that is required before commissioning, and the orientation training is entirely online.
2. Make the training easy to complete. Commissioner Basic used to be three two-hour sessions spread over three weeks. Now, it is one three-hour session and is role-specific—just enough for our commissioners to understand the role and get them going.
3. Make the training more consistent. Most councils were no longer using the three two-hour sessions and had created their own courses, creating many diverse training courses.

Goals for the Commissioner College were to:

1. Provide the materials necessary to conduct the course. The only thing we had provided in the past was the course outline in the Continuing Education manual. Slides were often downloaded from www.netcommish.com. No materials were provided at the national level.
2. Update the courses and the curriculum. Most of the courses had not been reviewed or updated in many years. We needed to get them current. Some new courses needed to be added and some dropped.
3. Make the content dynamic. By placing the content on the National Commissioner website rather than in a manual, we can update the courses as programs change. For example, Voice of the Scout can easily be added to the appropriate courses.
4. Make the training more consistent. National Commissioner Tico Perez had traveled to more than two-thirds of the councils and noticed that the training provided at the college varied widely. As a result, we need to provide more material for the instructor on how to conduct the course.
5. Make the training complete. Now, everything needed to teach the course is self-contained in a ZIP file.
6. Move away from PowerPoint as the primary teaching method.