Empire Protection
The hostile environment training facility in regional New South Wales: a cleared bush camp with a shelter and a vehicle.

Empire Institute

Hostile environment awareness training

Taught by people who do the work, for people about to be somewhere that does not care how well prepared they are.

Enquire about a course
A hut and a smoking fire in a high country clearing at dusk, set up for a live training scenario.
The high country site at last light. Scenarios run through the night, because that is when a person finds out what they actually do.

Why HEAT, and why immersive

Hostile environment awareness training exists because the moment things go wrong is the worst possible moment to be learning. People do not rise to the occasion; they fall back on what they have already practised. HEAT is the practice.

A slide deck can tell someone what a checkpoint is. It cannot teach them what they will actually do at one, which is why Empire runs the immersive course as a deployment rather than a classroom: the environment stops cooperating, and the response has to come from the participant rather than from the instructor.

It is bought most often by organisations sending staff somewhere their ordinary duty of care does not reach: journalists, aid and development staff, engineers and project teams, executives travelling to a market their insurer has an opinion about. The obligation to prepare those people sits with the employer, and the training is the evidence that it was discharged.

Empire also runs advanced close protection through the Sentinel pathway, for operators already doing protective work. That course is restricted on entry and says so plainly: an advanced course whose entry is open is not an advanced course.

Upcoming courses

Dates and availability change. Enquire and a consultant confirms what is actually open before anything is committed.