Skills and qualities required

• Excellent patience and concentration: much work is monotonous, painstaking, detailed and routine. Nothing like CSI!
• High quality analytical work
• Great attention to detail
• Logical, unbiased and methodical in your approach to solving problems as you will have to give impartial evidence in court
• An inquisitive, open mind
• Be able to work well in a team and independently
• Outgoing personality with strong verbal communication and presenting skills for reporting roles
• Confidence as reporting officers have to present evidence in court and be cross-examined by barristers. This makes up a quarter of the work
• Present complex scientific information in a clear, simple way than a member of a jury, with no scientific knowledge, can understand
• It helps if applicants have business skills as well as being technically capable
• Crimes happen at any time, so you may need to be prepared for evening and weekend call outs. Also court work may involve being on call and unsocial hours
• You need a strong stomach, as some of the scenes of crime can be upsetting.

You must also have a level of technical and functional ability to:

1. Apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense
2. Read and understand information and ideas presented in writing
3. Combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events)
4. See details at close range (within a few feet of the observer)
5. Communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand
6. Arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (e.g., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations)
7. Tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognising there is a problem
8. Identify or detect a known pattern (a figure, object, word, or sound) that is hidden in other distracting material
9. Generate or use different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways
10. Quickly make sense of, combine, and organise information into meaningful patterns.