A study was conducted to compare the self-directed learning readiness of National Fire Academy (NFA) fire executive development students to the theoretical norm and to other public managers. Procedures included testing 30 NFA fire executive development students with the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS). The distribution of fire executives' SDLRS scores were compared to the theoretical norm and to a group of 76 public managers. This comparison was made statistically with the chi-square goodness of fit calculation. The findings indicated that the fire executives' distribution of SDLRS scores was statistically higher than the theoretical norm and public managers. Although the fire executives scored higher than the public managers, 30 percent of the fire executives had only average scores on the SDLRS, which was judged to be unacceptable. This judgment was made because the literature indicated that professionals need a high degree of self-directed learning to be successful. Recommendations included the identification, implementation, and evaluation of a learning contract instructional methodology to be incorporated into the existing fire executive development course. (Includes 16 references and the SDLRS.) (Author/KC)