Online Scout Training

The highly anticipated and overdue Cub Scout leader online training—they first promised us it would be done in March… June… August—finally went live on September 3rd. I haven’t taken every course yet, although that is my goal, but from what I have done so far let me say—I love it! It is worth the wait. Every course is somewhere between 4 and 15 minutes long so even if you only have 15 mins free in a day, you can take a course. This is going to be SO helpful to new leaders.

And even if you are an experienced leader you will find the training a great way to review and make sure you are up to date with how things should work. There are SO many different courses. I haven’t counted them all but there are a lot! You can even look for training on a specific topic. Let’s say you want some ideas for den discipline – it’s there. Need to learn more about budgeting? You’ve got it. Advancement? Methods of Cub Scouting? Year-round Fun? Effective planning? Supplemental Resources? They are all in there. All those topics and lots more.

Right now all the courses are organized into 3 basic training groups—one for den leaders, one for cubmasters and one for the pack committee. Each group or position has within it 3 different “Learning plans” which are “Before the first meeting”, “The first 30 days” and “Position-Specific trained”. They suggest you take them in that order and even give you “due dates” for completion but you can take any course at any time. After completing all 3 sections a leader is qualified to wear the Trained patch. Each course has a video with narration and interactive quizzes. When complete it is automatically recorded that you completed the course. One really great part is that many courses overlap with other positions. For example, If you complete all of the Cubmaster training and then start on Pack Committee you will find that you are already partially complete. It gives you credit for the courses you already took as part of another learning plan. You can also go back and re-take or just review any course at any time.