Forensic investigator skills for your resume and career

Writing, writing, and wring. I can not emphasize enough how useful it is to be a clear and concise writer, regardless of the area in the criminal justice system you work in. It is a skill that takes some practice to master, but it pays off big in the end.

Strong grades, good relationships with your professors, and a related internship in a recognized organization.
Of course, the resume should be clearly structured, free of bad spelling, and have a professional presentation.

I would avoid a gap year if possible. The pandemic is showing all of us how difficult it is for students to stay focused on coursework when it is delivered online. I think it will be even more difficult to return to college coursework after a gap year without the daily routine of taking courses and studying. Some college is better than no college at all, but a college degree makes a grad more marketable than someone who has not completed a degree.

Primary skills for Crime Scene Investigation are: Photography, Fingerprint Processing, and the ability to sketch and measure a scene - think a floorplan or landscape diagram, not an artistic sketch. DNA is important, but DNA collection is dead simple.

The advancement of technology is a much greater driver of change, methinks. Certainly the advent of CCTV video in porch monitors, cell phones, and the like has advanced police ability to identify and track suspects, but it has also made cracks in the Blue Wall of Silence, illuminating police misconduct. There is a great need to incorporate different skills training into basic police academy, emphasizing verbal de-escalation and control as well as physical control techniques; there is a parallel need for a different approach to peer support by fellow officers.

Even in the era of Covid masks, advances in optical analysis of eyes (corneas, etc.) are leaning toward a supplement - if not actual replacement - of the traditional full-faced mug shot: a visual fingerprint, as it were. We are not there yet, but the trend appears to be a strong one. (That is distinct from facial recognition software, which has come under challenge on a number of fronts, starting with racial disparities.)

A new area that I am not yet well versed in seems to be the development of forensic analysis tools that "take the laboratory into the field," for all intents and purposes. This, too, will demand a change in training of either entry-level officers or evidence technicians, in order for the results to be sustainable in court in their own. I suspect that the economics of selling the products is a greater driver than scienterrific understanding at the field level: I'd like to be proven wrong, but the process of doing so may require dramatic changes not only to certification training but to higher education programs like ours.

Digital skills are already needed. The FBI kiddie porn investigation that led to the recent deaths of the two agents is only one example; terrorists (both foreign and domestic) use the dark web and other means to plan and coordinate action, as does organized crime (and gang crime, increasingly). Networks are not the only need; however, decoding digital communications even in single crimes for backgrounds of suspects, motives, and the like are already in use, and more needed.