Cheshire Police Assessment dates end of June

News hot off the press from my buddy in Cheshire is that their police assessment centre dates will be the last two weekends in June. BUT they are only giving people two weeks notice. So, if you are waiting for your assessment date, that is when it will be. I have no idea what justification forces have for not giving people more notice. It takes a lot of organisation to sort out rooms and staff, especially over a weekend as these dates are, so the force knows well in advance when these dates will be. Why they cannot have the common courtesy to notify people earlier is beyond me. To make their own staff work weekends, they will need to give weeks and weeks of notice. They seem to forget that the candidates also have lives, and will have to book time off work (not always easy to do), or make travel arrangements, or arrange childcare or whatever.  In fact, on this subject of preparation for police interviews and recruitment, I could imagine that the lack of notice is a deliberate ploy to limit peoples chances to prepare. Candidates (usually poor candidates) tend not to start preparing until they get an assessment date. So, giving them two weeks notice limits how much advance prep many candidates will do. This of course works in the favour of our students, who we prep up mercilessly, and so perform even beter in comparison to candidates who only started working 2 weeks before the assessment date. That is probably a factor as to why we do so well in getting people into Cheshire.

In any event, the moral of the story is that you need to be aware of the act that a lot of forces whether through inefficiency, incompetence or malice, do not give much notice of assessment centre dates. So, my advice is to work on the basis that you may only ever be a few weeks away from your assessment, and prepare on that presumption.

The same of course goes for the fitness test and final interview (if your force has one. Not all police forces do). I am always amazed when people say to me on courses” I have just been told I have my fitness test, and I only have a week to prepare.” Well, actually , no you haven’t, you lazy bastard, you have had since the day you decided to join the police to prepare, as you always knew you would have to do a fitness test! Same goes for final interview as well. Some forces will call you for final interview within ten days of telling you that you have passed your assessment day. It is no good crying about this, as you should be working on the basis that you may get called at any time anyway. Such is police recruitment, but if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined!!

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