Police Detective Constable Direct Entry: An Introduction

A Detective Constable is a high-ranking officer in the police force. The role of a Detective Constable is to participate in difficult and complex criminal investigations, interview victims of crimes (and suspects), and play a leading management role within the police.

When working as a Detective Constable, your responsibilities will include:

• Directing and participating in criminal investigations;
• Assessing a range of information and data, to ensure accurate decisions are made;
• Developing strategies for managing investigations, and evaluating existing strategies to determine how they could be improved;
• Using the latest technology, to assist ongoing investigations;
• Making cost-effective decisions, with the police budget in mind;
• Ensuring that interviews and interrogations are carried out with the utmost professionalism.

Naturally, this is all pretty difficult! The police won’t expect candidates from the Direct Entry course to just walk into the job and start solving crimes. You’ll be given extensive training to prepare you for all this, and to make sure that you are ready for the challenges ahead. Detective Constables are expected to operate under what are known as ‘building blocks’. These building blocks essentially underline the way in which you will work as a Detective Constable, and they will be especially useful when you sit the assessment centre. Think of these as a framework or structure for how you would tackle tasks when working in the police:

Police Detective Constable Competencies

As per the normal police standards, it’s extremely important that you have a good knowledge of the detective constable competencies. These are the core values/behaviours that you will be assessed against during the selection process.

We’ve listed these below:

• Emotional Awareness
• Positive Drive
• Resilience
• Team-working
• Communication
• Professional Approach
• Investigative Mind

Detective Constable Direct Entry Assessment Day

Okay, so you’ve cleared the first two hurdles, but now it’s time for the big one – the Direct Entry Assessment Day. During this super tough assessment day, you will need to pass three exercises in total:

• An in-tray exercise;
• A briefing exercise;
• An interview.

All of the exercises have been created with the Detective Constable role in mind. Both the in-tray and the briefing will place you in the role of a qualified detective constable. Following the completion of each exercise, you will be required to fill in a ‘self-reflection’ form. This is essentially a form which gives you the opportunity to note down what you think you did well during the exercise, and what you think you could have done better. The self-reflection forms are an important part of the assessment, and the police will look at these when assessing your overall performance.

The competencies will play a crucial role in how well you score at the assessment centre. In every single exercise, you should be aiming to demonstrate that you have these competencies and understand why they are important to the role. Before you attend the assessment centre, make sure you sit down and study the competencies in careful detail. If you cannot show an in-depth understanding of the competencies then you will not pass the assessment centre and progress to the next stage.

Below we’ve broken down the briefing exercise and the in-tray exercise for you.

Detective Constable Assessment Centre: The Interview

During the Detective Constable Assessment Centre interview, you will face questions focused around the competencies and values of policing. You will face at least one question based on each of the competencies.

You need to take into account all of the micro factors that make up these behaviours. For example, ‘team working’ is not just about working as a member of a team. It’s about communicating with your team, being a supportive person, asking for help, showing understanding and consideration for the feelings of others, and being a leader. So, when you give a response showing that you are a good team worker, take care to show these qualities.

When the assessors question you, they won’t always make it so easy. While it’s true that some questions will be pretty black and white, for example, ‘give us an example of when you have worked as part of a team to resolve an issue’, they may also try and make it a bit more difficult. For some questions, you’ll need to take a moment and think about what competency would apply in this scenario. For example, ‘give us an example of a time when you have overcome adversity in the workplace.’ You’ll notice that the wording of this question doesn’t actually incorporate any of the competencies. When you get a question like this, consider the main issue. In this case, the words ‘overcome adversity’ would be the main topic of the question – which can be linked with resilience.