Essential Prepper Skills for Beginners
There are a lot of beginning preppers out there – people who want to start prepping, but don’t know how to, or where to start. A lot of these people are relatively young and are looking at what skills they should learn to become prepared for emergencies. When you’re just getting started on this journey, there is an essential list of prepper skills for beginners that everybody should start with before moving on to more complicated skills.
I don’t want to overwhelm people, so I figured I would only list a few skills and the circumstances that you would want to learn these skills under, as well as who they are targeted at. There are all sorts of other skills, but these should form a decent basis for many of the readers of this blog.
When you’re done with these skills, be sure to check out the list of the top survival skills you should be teaching your kids.
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How to Start a Fire
Whether you are bugging in (staying home) in an emergency, or bugging out (leaving the area), knowing how to light a fire can save your life.
As demonstrated by Texas in early 2021, even when you live somewhere that normally is quite warm, every so often you will have a serious cold snap, and especially if that happens after another major disaster, you may be on the road.
Some of us live in climates that can kill you with cold weather during much of the year, and so we learn how to start a fire in case something happens to civil infrastructure during the winter. Even temporarily, if I cannot heat my home for three days, I will die in the middle of many winters in Utah.
Even if you live in the middle of New Mexico however, the advantages of learning how to light a fire in an emergency are numerous. You can heat or cook food, you can sterilize medical implements, or you can just light a fire to keep away the dark. All of these things can be very useful to you in an emergency.
I recommend you learn how to light a fire using several methods, from using a lighter or matches all the way to using flint and steel or a lens. And while those tools are nice, I also recommend being able to start at least one fire without the use of a fire starter.
When you do learn to start a fire, remember to do it somewhere safe and you should probably check local ordinances on the subject first.
Understand that starting a fire actually constitutes several sub-skills, including:
- Where is safe to light a fire, and how to make a safe area to light one
- What is safe to burn
- How to actually light the fire
- How to light the fire in adverse conditions
- How to grow a fire
- And how to make sure a fire does not spread- including when you are done using it, so you can make sure it is put out correctly
The Basics of Obtaining Safe Water
Water is essential to human life. You will die in relatively short order with no water, and might die quicker if you cannot get safe water to drink.
Knowing how to obtain safe water is a big deal. Especially if you have someone who has certain medical conditions, such as diabetes, it can be a big deal to make sure you have enough water on hand very quickly.
To be fair, most people will just need to have a couple of flats of bottled water on hand for basic water storage, but this is a basic skill for longer-term emergency preparedness.
Obtaining safe water also have several sub skills, including:
- How to store water
- How to filter water
- When different kinds of filters are needed
- How to boil water (not quite as easy as it sounds. Close, but not quite).
- Distilling water
- Chemically purifying water
First Aid
First aid covers all sorts of things, from putting a bandaid on your finger, to making sure the car accident victim does not die while the ambulance books it to your location, to just helping someone deal with severe dehydration.
First aid also gives you an excuse to get all sorts of skills that you can put on your resume. Being first aid certified or knowing CPR etc, can make a difference on getting a beginning level job.
First aid covers a variety of specific skills, including:
- Triage
- Determining care
- Determining if someone needs to see a professional, and not just be treated in the field
- Cleaning a wound
- Bracing a sprained limb
- Keeping someone from losing too much blood until the ambulance comes
- How to maintain a first aid kit, including turning over older supplies as appropriate
Read a Map
Reading a map is one of those things that a lot of people never learn to do because they don’t have to. After all, if there is a problem, they have a smartphone, right?
…Except in an emergency when you can’t charge it, or the cell towers are down or… right.
Reading a map means that you can find the nearest grocery store, or learn where the FEMA food distribution center is- or just where your aunt Ruth is up in the mountains with poor cell reception.
Also, if things get really bad, having a road atlas of the country/area you live in can be a very useful thing so that you can get out of a dangerous/into a safer area.
Reading a map is actually relatively easy, and can be picked up in an hour or two. Learning to read a map can also be a lot of fun as a leisure activity. Just grab another human and go to a safe part of your city to find a specific landmark by map, such as an ice cream place, and then go have ice cream, because ice cream.
Reading a map includes a lot of variations on a basic skill, with a couple of things that transfer between map types-
- Knowing how to read cardinal points
- Knowing how to read a scale
- How to read a map legend
- For bonus points, if you plan to bug out on foot, you will probably want to know how to read a topographical map.
- Knowing how to use a compass with a map is not essential in all circumstances, but is generally useful.
Plan for Emergencies
Planning for emergencies is a very broad skill and is actually something that people do professionally. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is filled with people who do it all day every day.
Everyone forgets the emergency, however, which leads to things like the disaster that followed hurricane Katrina.
Emergency planning consists of a LOT of skills, but on a practical level, a few of them that any prepper will find useful are:
- Risk assessment
- Preparedness planning
- Making checklists
- Post-disaster planning
- Convincing other people to co-operate (harder than it sounds a lot of time)
- Knowing the cost of each preparation, in both time and money compared to other options
As you can see, the basic list of skills for beginning preppers is not a long or an involved list, but each item on this list can be life-saving. Only after you have mastered these skills should you move on to more advanced ones.