So I was perusing the survival and prepper websites the other day (as I do every day) and came across a couple articles on prepper skills. Then I saw on facebook that a couple people were asking pretty much the same thing: what are the most important prepper skills/abilities you should be working on?
One key thing to know is that the more you know, the less you have to carry. Knowing something doesn’t weigh any more than not knowing something, but not knowing something can make you carry more than if you knew more.
Read my article on skills vs stuff if you haven’t already.
Well, at first it seemed like this would be a no-brainer. Then I started getting deeper into it. Here are a few examples that I got on my facebook page when I posed the question of what top 10 skills you should learn first (there was no example given so people just answered with whatever scenario they had in mind):
- The survivalist mindset (including creativity)
- Great Physical fitness
- Navigation
- Vast knowledge of the flora and fauna
- First Aid
- Fire making
- Shelter construction
- Finding or producing Water and Food
- Trapping
- Weapon mastery
- Physical fitness
- Fire starting
- Shelter construction
- Water purification
- Hunting/shooting
- Trapping
- Food production
- Woodworking
- Medical/First Aid
- Blacksmithing
*Not in original post > http://www.freedompreppers.com/preppers-checklist-net.pdf
- Fire
- shelter
- trapping
- cooking
- water management
- tracking
- gardening
- seed harvesting
- first aid
- shooting(bow and firearm)
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- Security /armed skills
- Water purification
- hunting
- food prep/storage
- gardening
- Herbal medicine
- building shelter/etc
- heating/solar/Power
- gathering
- teaching
- water filtration/purification
- build/find shelter techniques
- fire starting and building
- basic first aid
- plant/insect identification
- foraging – plants, berries, insects, etc.
- physical fitness
- evasion/defensive tactics
- orienteering
- communications
- Water purification
- Fire staring
- Shelter building
- Wound care
- Food/nutrition acquiring
- Weapons
- Hygiene
- Preserving food for travel
- Items to trade
- Keeping your items DRY
- Finding and cleaning water
- Build fire
- Shelter
- Food
- Gardening. Husbandry (like raising chickens and rabbits). Hunting. Foraging
- First Aid/Medical
- Combat
- Negotiate
- Hope
- Not afraid to kill
- can improvise tools and weapons if necessary
- Setting Traps, Snares, Jingle Wire alarm systems
- Hunting/gathering
- Shelter Building
- Good hand to hand combat skills (Staff, Sword, Knife, Ax, as well as Pressure Points)
- Tracking skills
- Willingness to do whatever it takes to defend and care for the Group
- Fire starting many different ways fire building (Long lasting fire)
- Knowledge to find and treat water
- Tying multiple styles of knots both load bearing and not.
- starting fires by hand
- Learning smoke signals
- Making safe drinking water from scratch
- Learning Different styles of traps
- Learning the safe and poisonous plants and how to identify them
- field first aid
- How to make bone hooks and needles
- How to tan hides and make clothing
- Map reading and navigation
- Preparing for a long term situation
- Water collection and purification
- Planting a garden
- Raising livestock
- Foraging plants
- Trapping/hunting/fishing
- Weapon proficiency and maintenance
- Distillation of spirits
- First aid/herbal remedies
- Fire
- How to use non power tools
Now some of those aren’t really skills but traits but the lists helped me by doing that. I decided that there are things that aren’t quite skills but rather abilities that you need to work on as well, so I tweaked the focus of this article a bit.
There are many considerations that you have to think about when deciding which skills and abilities you should be focusing on learning if you’re trying to be prepared for being lost camping, home invasions, weather emergencies, SHTF, TEOTWAWKI, or whatever. Here’s what you need to consider when trying to figure out what skills and abilities you need to know or have to deal with SHTF or emergencies:
What are you preparing for?
The first consideration is really, what are you preparing for? I wrote a whole article on this concept previously. If your plan is focused primarily on responding to a local weather disaster like a hurricane or tornado, you’ll probably need skills that rely more heavily on medical care. If you live in an area prone to flooding, you’ll need to focus more on water filtration and waste disposal. If you’re greatly concerned about the total breakdown of society or a government takeover, you may want to focus more heavily on weapons-handling, self-defense, and tactics.
This is essentially the same thing as trying to get somewhere without knowing where it is you’re trying to go. You need to know what threats you’ll most likely be facing and what risks those threats pose that you’re wanting to mitigate (your destination – your Point B), then look at what you can do right now about them (your current location – or Point A), and map yourself out a course to get from Point A to Point B.
What do you have available to you?
As I wrote about in my 3 inventories post previously, in order to come up with a plan to survive, you need to know what you have available. What do you know how to do? What friends do you have available? What can your friends do? What equipment do you have available to you? You’re essentially taking inventory of what skills, abilities, and stuff you have or know how to get.
If you’ve spent some time gathering a few things for an EDC kit (every day carry kit) to have with you at all times and a well-planned bug out bag in case SHTF or whatever, then you’ll have a big advantage. For example, if you have a good water filter in it like the Sawyer MINI
that I carry in both my go bag and my bug out bag (and my Harley), you don’t have to focus as much time on learning other water filtration methods. If you want a good book on what to pack in a bug out bag, read Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit
.
that I carry in both my go bag and my bug out bag (and my Harley), you don’t have to focus as much time on learning other water filtration methods. If you want a good book on what to pack in a bug out bag, read Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit.
Stop screaming back in the back corner. Remember; this is about prioritization. If you have an hour to learn either first aid or water purification and you have a sawyer mini, you should focus on first aid first and then back to water purification if you have time. I didn’t say that if you have a water filter that you don’t have to learn how to filter water without one. Geesh.
This isn’t just about inventory either. Along your route (in this case, from FNG’s gambling-living neighborhood to the cabin), there are things available such as locations to get water and places to avoid such as section-8 housing. The more you can use something along the way, the less you have to focus on it. The more something introduces a challenge to you along the way, the more you need to prioritize mitigating that challenge.
What strengths and weaknesses do you have?
If you’ve had 30 years of experience as an 18B Special Forces Weapons Sergeant then you probably don’t need to be focusing much time on developing on weapons and tactics. Obviously you need to maintain what you have but if you’re already a master at CQB and aren’t that great at trapping, then guess which you should be focusing on if your intent is to be as prepared as possible.
On the other hand, if you have a physical disability, you should probably be focusing your time on learning transferrable and non-physical skills such as communications or medical so you can be an effective member of a team, regardless of your circumstances, in addition to the obvious: how to deal with your disability during a crisis. It would be time better-spent for you than learning CQB.
Each of you have a wide variety of experiences and abilities that are completely different than others. You need to take an inventory of yourself and see what you can leverage and what you need to compensate for.
