Many investigators find that when they open their business that some potential clients many be a little weary. As they have not used your services before they may wonder if your services are really worth the money and whether they have what it takes to follow the job through and come to a useful conclusion for the client whether it be a surveillance, a service of legal process or any other investigation.

This is where the Academy has decided to go a step further. If you hold the Academy’s Edexcel BTEC Advanced Private Investigation Level 3 award you are obviously a qualified and professional private investigator. Your BTEC diploma is valuable to you. It shows that you are competent in all aspects of private investigation and is evidence that you have taken time to study the industry of your profession and not just started up alone on basic knowledge. It shows to your clients that you know what you are doing and is sure to boost their confidence in trusting you with what can sometimes be a very personal or complicated job.

Knowing this, we at the Academy have come up with a way for clients to see with their own eyes how qualified their investigator is. Any investigator that holds our BTEC diploma can request to have our API logo which says ‘Verify my Qualification’ . Any person to request this logo must to put it on their business website and create a link to the personalised URL address which will infact hold information on you, the student,  what grade you achieved and the date. This information will only be available through clicking the link which you should have embedded in the API logo.

On June the 30th 2010 there will be an SIA meeting in Birmingham to discuss the approved contractor scheme and licensable activity amongst many other issues.

Ian Withers will be attending as the WAPI representative. The outcome of this meeting will of course be of great interest to both the Academy students and all Private Investigators throughout our industry.

The Academy will of course blog the outcome in due course. If anyone has any points or short questions that could be posed to the SIA please feel free to let us know.

Directors of the PI- Academy have been discussing the revised final exam for the BTEC qualification in preparation to be sent to the SIA.

A good result for the World Association of Professional Investigators at the latest NOS meeting, Process is now back in, and available to be used by awarding bodies for future qualifications of our sector.

At the Investigations Advisory Working Group Workshop 5 held at Skills For Security on 02/03/2010 Ian Withers representing the World Association of Professional Investigators  clarified that NOS are not to be confused with SIA Licensing. NOS may be used by awarding bodies to develop qualifications, but a pick and mix approach would be used to suit the relevant requirements. Ian Withers confirmed that from a WAPI perspective process serving is an essential part of an investigators role and should not be omitted; concerns were raised highlighting that if process serving were to be omitted from the suite of NOS this would potentially take a critical stream of income away from investigators.

After detailed discussions and consideration of the implications to omit process serving, the group agreed that this activity should be reinserted into the suite of NOS which will be submitted to the regulators and (UKCES) on 31/3/2010.

The Edexcel BTEC Advanced Private Investigation Level 3 Distance Learning Course contains a comprehensive module on Process Serving which is extremely beneficial to any new comer to the industry or indeed those who are not well versed in the subject.