Minimum Standards vs Professional Development

Training is both a path and a shortcut to skill development. It accelerates the path to higher proficiency. When individuals are left to figure out their own way of doing things, their progress is not only slower but may veer off in an unintended direction.

For a police officer, that training can be mentorship with a skilled senior officer or attending a class to develop or enhance a needed skill. In police work, there is no universal answer to every problem officers face. Officers need to be quick-thinking and well-versed in options to determine appropriate solutions. Training helps provide more potential solutions to be applied when applicable. Training expands skill sets.

Not all training serves the same purpose. Some training develops new skills and expands an officer’s capabilities. Other training maintains certifications and ensures minimum standards are met. Both have value, but they are not the same thing.

When mentorship is absent, inexperienced officers develop far more slowly. Officers left completely on their own progress far more slowly than those who are mentored, coached, encouraged, or working within a team environment. Mentorship is an important facet of effective police cultures.

Hazmat, CPR, EVO, radar/lidar, intoxilyzer, and sexual harassment are a few examples of state-mandated training that police officers regularly receive. A lot of state-mandated training is upkeep to ensure that certain skill sets or certifications meet a minimum standard. It is maintenance, not development. The foundations of those skills have already been established, and there is little additional development beyond maintaining certification.

Unfortunately, some police departments are using this state-mandated minimum training as a crutch. They use this to meet the yearly training requirements for individual officers, effectively removing the need for further training for those agencies/officers seeking only the minimum standard. This practice deprives individual officers of additional skill development training.

Successful and effective officers have sought training beyond the minimum standard and beyond the training their agency provided. Many of those officers were mentored early in their careers and later mentored others. The success they achieve is earned through work, not granted via attendance.

Minimum standards maintain certification; mentorship and additional training build competent officers.