Originally Posted by
TGS
Done.
1 thing to note is that I may have skewed your results/completed it improperly. My agency doesn't have a mandatory yearly in-service, but rather a shotgun approach. It's mandatory for a field office to fill a given inservice class, but it isn't really tracked by person....so, for example, my field office gets two 24-person, weeklong refresher classes per year....but in my current office, we only have to attend 1 per 2 year tour at the field office. Our last refresher was 1 day of medical (half day tac-med, half day CPR/AED), 1 day of room entry tactics, 1 day of defensive tactics/ground fighting, and the other two days split between legal, FATS simulator/transition drills, etc. They take feedback seriously and modify the course depending on what the office requests, as long as some basic wickets are touched on.
On top of that, we are able to take a 2 week, residential in-service including all hard skills.
It's strange, because there isn't a whole lot of minimum, mandatory stuff for us.....yet the agency is overwhelmingly supportive of us seeking out training. It's pretty hard to hit that limit, actually. Recently a 12-week advanced hard skills course was made mandatory for all agents (which requires a 5 week residential course every 5 years to keep current). In addition to being scheduled for that course, in the last year alone I have done the 1 week refresher, an active shooter instructor course, am waitlisted for a tac-med instructor course, slated for a CISD class, did a 1 day bomb course, am slated for a 3 day advanced pistol course next month, was slated for a week long advanced interviewing course that got canned due to a hurricane, did a 2 day special events evacuation planning course, did a 1 week fire as a weapon course with the world's leading fire department, and....I don't know, there's probably more I'm forgetting. The 3 day legal refresher at FLETC is strongly encouraged, and lots of people go back through FLETC for a variety of 3 day-3 week long investigative courses. Our office in particular is awesome, and let's us build contacts and get slots in courses offered by neighboring agencies whether they be state/local or federal.
We are only required to shoot 3 times a year, but are allowed to shoot during our regular day, and if you're in the DC area you can sign up for however many practice sessions with our instructors that your supervisor will let you. We can also sign up for language training in almost any language we want, and keep a roster in the office so you can find someone skilled in a language for whatever needed. For those of us who are EMTs, we can take in person refreshers if we're in the DC area or at least get 1 hour video-teleconference sessions once a week.
So, it's odd and some people do the bare minimum (good quality but woefully lacking in frequency), while whores like me can't find enough time for all the training we want to sign up for. The amount/quality of training we can get is just fucking stupendous, if you just ask.....while other people can barely remember which way the bullet goes in the mag, or fail a shotgun qual of 10 rounds at 7 and 15 yards.......
Reply With Quote