Scooter, you've got some very good advice from the people in "the know", but I don't know if you are hearing what they are saying. The advice people are giving is that higher level education is becoming a minimum requirement for consideration of a law enforement position, with the low end being an Associate Degree, and the high end being a preference for advanced degrees (Masters or even Phd). sRothstein has already given the advice, that attending one of these tactical training classes is of no substantial value, aside from personal self defense education, for applying to a law enforement profession, but yet that appears to be your immediate course of action. If you are going to spend money on education, it seems to me that money should be directed towards obtaining a degree of some sort. At the very least, if you obtain your degree and do not eventually land a LE job, you still have your degree to fall back on for other professions. Sinking all of your money on tactical training classes seems to be putting all of your eggs in one basket, with a big bet that it will land you a LE job. If it doesn't, then those tactical classes won't help you if you choose to pursue other professions.scootergeek wrote:Thanks guys, for all the responses. Yeah I know theres much more to becoming an officer or agent than just shooting and probably shooting is the last thing I should be concerned with.
I'm gonna go ahead and sign up for the carbine 1 course at tiger valley and go from there just to have a lil edge into all of this. This is all gonna be a money pit and stressful throughout this process.
Head strong I will carry on.
I think we often look at our dream job, and simplify it to a single skill that we think as being the core requirement to getting a job. Coming out of high school, I decided I wanted to get into computers for a living. I had taken a computer science class in high school and liked it. So I went to college with the desire to learn how to program, and eventually got my bachelors in MIS (think Computer Science with a business bias). As part of my degree I had to take a considerable amount of busines related courses (management, marketing, finance & investments, accounting, economics, management science, Business Communication (aka Speech), business calculus & trig, statistics, etc), OUTSIDE of my core computer related courses. This frustrated me to no end, because all I wanted to do was to learn how to develop applications (aka program). After school I got hired by some companies doing what I wanted, writing applications. Very soon after I entered the workforce I joined a major giant in the industry as a consultant. I quickly realized that my job was to write applications to either eliminate human roles, or greatly reduce the amount of work that humans were supposed to do. So that meant, I had to learn how they did their job, learn the rules and logic behind their decision making in their job. I had to learn their profession so that I could model it in code. While learning their jobs, I realized there was much more than just learning how to write code. So when I worked with a Loss Prevention department with a Major Retailer who was trying to find a way to reduce theft by looking a data mining models to proactively look for patterns, all of those statistics courses all of the sudden made sense. When I worked with CIO who was looking for a strategy and implementation plan to update his IT infrastructure in his retail stores, all of those accounting classes, and management science classes kicked in. You see where I'm going with this. My original idea of what it meant to work in the computer industry was overly simplified, by me, as just learning how to write code. Years after, I find that writing code is very minimal to what I really do. The same thing applies to law enforcement (or any job for that matter). There is often considerably much more that outsiders looking in don't see when considering that job as a profession.
You've now been given a glimpse to the inside on what it takes to pursue a LE profession. How you proceed is up to you.