Katie Prime, Author at ApprenticeTips.com

Police Constable Apprenticeship: Introduction

The Police Constable apprenticeship allows a learner interested in serving the public within a police force to get on the job training. As a police officer, you will be responsible for keeping the public and your colleagues safe, using your ability to assess situations and communicate effectively to bring about the best possible outcome to any situation, incident or crime. It is not just arresting criminals; it is giving support to vulnerable peoples, encouraging community cohesion, and investigating situations to uncover evidence. All the while, you will be operating to uphold the law, adhering to its standards as well as the standards of your police force.

Requirements

Entry Requirements

Typically, you will be 18 or older, and with a Level 3 qualification (or equivalent) prior to entry. A Level 2 qualification in Maths and English (or equivalent) will be necessary either before the course or as you complete it. This varies from force to force.

Behavioural Requirements

You’re more suited for becoming a police officer if you’re a responsible person, willingly taking accountability when the situation calls for it. This means putting yourself in leadership positions if necessary, giving guidance, taking risks, and accepting accountability. In the same vein, you need to be a professional: upholding standards of integrity, decency, ethics and values.

You also need to be a group player. You’ll be collaborating with other police officers, taking orders and working together to solve problems. As you’ll be facing the public, you need to be open and communicative, also taking appropriate action when necessary. This also comes with the requirement of being emotionally intelligent—gauging problems sometimes and especially in tense situations—and emotionally resilient.

You’ll also need to be good at thinking on your feet. Problem solving, looking at creative ways to approach situations, and a sense of curiosity are also key.

line of police officers in london for police constable apprenticeship article — Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

What Will You Learn During the Police Constable Apprenticeship Course?

Policing requires officers to respond appropriately to a huge variety of contexts, whether they’re concerning the pubic or responsibilities within the police force.

Police constables will need to be able to know:

The ethics and values of professional policing, including: duty of care, service delivery, employment practice, efficiency, effectiveness and value for money, Code of Ethics, professional standards, and equality, diversity and human rights.

Key cross-cutting and inter-dependent areas of policing, including: roles and responsibilities, criminal justice, counter terrorism, vulnerability (including public protection and mental health) and risk.

Applicable aspects of Authorised Professional Practice (the official source of policing professional practice), legal and organisational requirements relating to the operational policing context.

Within the course, you will have to:

Respond to incidents, aiming to bring out the best possible outcome despite the nature of the incident
Conduct risk and threat analyses
Investigate incidents and crimes
Form and maintain partnerships with all manner of individuals, organisations and communities
Approach and resolve conflict safely and lawfully
Conduct investigations to the highest standard
Interview members of the public; victims, witnesses and suspects
Research and present information and intelligence within the force and to public
Search individuals, spaces, properties and objects
Monitor and manage health and safety requirements within complex situations
Interpret and apply the law responsibly and within context
Communicate effectively with different sections of society
Respond to incidents, reviewing appropriate and justifiable actions
Provide leadership and support to the public and to colleagues
Assess risks and threats and use justifiable action in response
Use police legal powers to deal with complex situations
Research, plan and implement new actions in order to responsibly react to, communicate with and encourage partner or outside organisations

Please find a full breakdown of these skills, behaviours and requirements <a href=“https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/apprenticeship-standards/police-constable-integrated-degree-v1-0“>here.</a>

What Can I Expect at the End of This Course?

This apprenticeship course should last no longer than 3 years. By the end of this course, you should have a Level 6 qualification, understand and have experience in roles and responsibilities across policing that are suited to your level. If you’ve not previously achieved a Level 2 qualification in English or Maths (or equivalent), then you should by the end of the course.

Police Constable Apprenticeship: Conclusion

Becoming a police officer as an apprentice will put you right where the action is. You’ll be able to learn whilst you’re responding to the public, giving you the opportunity to have key policing experiences. As a police officer, you’ll have a duty to yourself, but especially to others, upholding law and order within the UK. If duty, justice, teamwork and keeping others safe are important attributes for you, joining this course to become a police constable may be worth your consideration.

You can find out more UK apprenticeships across every industry by clicking here.

Tone of Voice Guidelines: Why Brand Voice is So Important for Digital Marketing

How a business’ content looks, sounds and reads will be dependent on how the business wants to be portrayed. As a digital marketer, you need to be able to reflect this, using your writing skills to reflect their tone of voice guidelines and their branding. Written content is a vital part of a brand’s formation, and its success: brands need to be recognisable in order to be remembered; if they can be remembered, then they can be a customer’s primary choice when considering what to buy. But in order to be recognisable, their messaging, and their branding, has to be consistent across every piece of content they produce.

When you can accurately reflect their tone of voice and their language, you can create amazing content that will promote the brand in exactly the way it needs.

Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Tone of Voice Guidelines: Tips to Perfect Your Brand Voice

1. Know Your Audience

The tone of voice you use when writing is really dependent on who you’re writing this content for. Who are you marketing to, and what language are they expecting to see?

For this, it always helps to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. For example, you might be writing a leaflet about a pharmaceutical conference. Your audience are going to be adults who are used to technical, industry-specific language. At the same time, they want clear and direct information. Your leaflet would therefore need to have an informative tone, using relevant terminology at the right time, and clear instructions.

On the other hand, you might be writing the description of a board game aimed at 5-10 year olds. These kids are not going to need medicinal terminology. The content is going to be a lot more fun—a bright, happy tone with very, very simple language. Instead of clear directions (which will be found in the instructional manual), your language will be emotive: positive descriptive words, exclamation points, even onomatopoeia.

Though these are at the opposite ends of the spectrum, they showcase how central your audience is to everything you write.

2. Adjust for Platform

Your tone of voice might change according to where your writing is going. For example: social media platforms put different expectations on the users, but brand voice can still be retained throughout each.

TikTok is video-based, and, like Twitter, it restricts the amount of characters you can use in each post. Compare this against LinkedIn, where the tone is a lot more professional. Both LinkedIn and Facebook are not so restrictive when it comes to character count, so you can flex your writing skills there. Usually, your posts on Twitter become jumping points for links. Alternatively, long posts that incorporate stories, observations and information, are more likely to succeed on LinkedIn.

These restrictions mean you have to get creative with what you’re going to say, and how you’re going to say it. How concise—or detailed—do you want to be? Are you responding to what the users want from you on that platform?

3. Are There Tone of Voice Guidelines in Place?

Depending on the business you’re writing content for, they may already have a process put in place for their brand messaging for you to access. Style guides and brand guidelines are a huge help when it comes to checking your tone of voice.

Quite often, the business will provide terminology and tone guidelines with examples already. Having examples of the language you can use means you always have something to go back to if you need a refresher.

If this does exist for you—then don’t forget it. A refresher is always helpful, no matter how confident you are at writing.

4. Do Your Research

If you don’t have a helpful guide—and even if you do—research is still, and will always be, your friend. That means, take a look at what’s already existing. How does the brand conduct itself in the mediums you’re writing in: what language do they use, what tone does it have—is it simple? Informative? Technical? Professional? Inclusive?

If it helps, make notes on particular types of words that you want to use in your own writing. If they have particular brand messaging, phrases that keep cropping up all over the place, it might benefit your work to include it too. Your aim is to reflect the brand voice in every way you can, so you can keep the branding consistent everywhere they are.

5. It’s Not Just Words

Brands aren’t just words. They’re made up from many different aspects, but one of the most telling clues you can get into a brand is how they <em>look</em>. In a blog post, a featured image for a website page, even the logo itself, you can get an insight into how the brand presents itself. Colours, shapes, names and fonts all contribute to a particular ‘feel’ that consumers will notice, even if they don’t realise they’re doing it.

Let’s go back to the pharmaceutical leaflet vs the kids’ board game. They’re going to have very different feels to them: the kids’ board game will be colourful, with fun, rounded fonts, and images of happy kids celebrating. On the other hand, the leaflet will have a professional look: sticking to the brand’s colours, distinct and clean fonts—and the images, if of people, will be set in relevant professional environments.

All of these can give you clues into how a brand wants to be seen, and this can inform your content even further.

Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Tone of Voice Guidelines: Conclusion

The tone of voice you use in your content for a business needs to adhere to the brand messaging they use. Depending on what the business is, this can vary wildly, so you need to be on top on how your words work: how they look, how they sound, and what their purpose is. But you can get plenty of clues from what already exists from the company, so you can reflect exactly what makes the brand memorable—and therefore successful.