If you want to become a forensic investigator you need to be aware of the abilities and skills that are required to be in your professional arsenal. These directly depend on the type of job that you’ll manage to get. Being an investigator that studies forensics and various crimes and murders is not easy at all. Many people want to have such a career, but are unfortunately extremely far away from having the abilities that we are going to talk about in his post. While knowledge is in close connection with various abilities, it doesn’t represent experience, which is often expressed through your potential and skill of doing something. Last time I had to complete a job announcement of a private company that was looking for professional forensic investigators I was asked for the following:

Effective oral and writing communication

Being a forensic investigator means that you are also running some detective work when gathering evidence. Your ability and experience in making others “spit out” every little aspect of the information that you are required to know is extremely important and appears to be very useful when doing a certain investigation for a murder case. On the other hand, the lack of communication will always create barriers and make it impossible for you to discover the truth because people won’t trust you their alibi, information, knowledge, secrets, etc. All investigators, no matter what profile you try to develop, need to know how to talk with others properly and to master effective communication skills properly. Without this particular ability you risk not to get your favorite high paid job of being an investigator. So make sure you prepare yourself to answer to such queries when being interviewed for the job position.

Stressful conditions should not affect the effectiveness of your work

People who are having problem when seeing murder scenarios, blood and dead bodies are not meant to go as forensic investigators. They better look for ways to do something else in life. While most of the ordinary people are experiencing a shock when visiting the place of the murder and facing it directly, a professional forensic investigator must know how to retain his feelings and basically have “cold blood” when gathering evidence, taking photos, investigating or analyzing certain aspects of the death of the person. You have to be emotionally strong and not let anything else around you influence your sober judgment of things that occurred and might take place rather soon. You also have to prove the ability to calm down the spirits in case you are one of the first persons to arrive at the place of a certain murder (even if this is quite difficult – police is always there first). You aren’t working for the police and dealing with crimes all day long, but when your professional advice of a forensic expert is required you have to be able to retain your feelings and proudly face everything that you are exposed to.

Being able to read and interpret medical and accident reports

Sometimes, a lot of forensic paper work needs to be gathered, analyzed, studied, archived and reported to your superiors. While we have talked that something like this seems to be extremely boring, in most of the cases people are just ready to go for it just to prove that they can do it. Nevertheless, a lot of experience is required when you are required to correctly interpret certain older documents related to a case of murder for example. It isn’t easy to make those around you believe in your document interpretation options, but it’s good to know that in case something like this is required you’ll proudly be able to submit your opinion, even in court, if necessary. Your investigations as a forensic detective are always going to be based on various reports, either medical or police ones. In order to determine the hour, the cause and the main reason of death, you’ll need to carefully look through those papers and see if there is any useful information that might help you determine the above mentioned moments.
Sometimes it is pretty hard to see a connection, but this is the career that you have chosen.

Overtime work during various day and night shifts

Your boss tells you that there are five working days and a nine to five schedule in your lab; however, forensic investigators like you and I always experience a lot of unpredictable situations like fresh and unexpected cases of murder and they are obliged to do something about them. Sometimes, waking at the middle of the night and running to another corner of the city is going to be required. If something happened at the end of your work day, remaining overtime and working till the case is solved is a must, otherwise you risk to lose a lot of precious information about the murder that might help in solving it in the long run. What you must often do is face certain difficulties related to your sleeping time and working schedule, but you see, this is just another unpleasant aspect of the work and career that you wanted so much to follow. Don’t worry; there are benefits here as well.

The ability to take professional digital photographs as evidence for documentation

A forensic has nothing to do at the place of the murder without his digital camera. Professionally taken pictures help a lot because they represent the easiest data for you and your computer to analyze and correlate when there are some evident connections between cases. Nevertheless, being able to collect, compare and analyze, present and report evidence in photo format is extremely necessary when working as a forensic investigator. You’ll be experiencing a lot of difficulties without the ability of taking good pictures. Learn how to correctly monitor the murder scene, how to take proper photographs of the body, etc. Remember that you are going to need this no matter what happens. All investigators of this kind are required to either have a camera or a give a professional one for work. No matter what level of skill you have in photography you always need to find solutions to improve it.

Calmness, a proper temperament, accurateness and emotionally unattached

You don’t need to be personally worried or emotionally attached about a certain crime case or scenario because this is going to stop you from making your work till the end. It won’t always happen, but no matter who the deceased person was to you, a cold blooded attitude is required in order to be able to accurately gather the evidence, report everything that happened and try to discover the real cause of death or some other quite unknown circumstances. Remember that calmness is a trait that is highly valuable at every forensic investigator. Keep your temperament cool and act wisely whenever you arrive at the murder scene. If you are experiencing problems with anything that I’ve mentioned above you need to train yourself when possible and become better in what you do. Train these skills whenever possible.

By far, these are the most necessary abilities of a forensic investigator that you are going to be queried for when either trying to submit a job application or just trying to improve your current skill at your work place. Remember that being a forensic investigator makes you extremely responsible and there is a certain price that you have to pay for being who you are and having such a privileged job.