Eight Inspectors (IPs) and four Sergeants (SGTs), the first batch of officers who had completed the Standard Criminal Investigation Course (SCIC) and the subsequent Workplace Learning (WPL) Phase, received the award of Advanced Diploma from Deputy Commissioner (Operations) Lau Yip-shing at the SCIC Graduation Ceremony on March 17. Since the accreditation by the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications in January 2016, over 400 officers have started the WPL, and more officers are expected to complete the WPL and would then be awarded the Advanced Diploma later this year.

With regard to the Advanced Diploma Programmes in Criminal Investigation, the graduates of SCIC will generally be posted to frontline crime units to receive on-the-job training for a minimum of 465 hours on six areas, namely Professional Ethics and Leadership, Criminal Investigations, the Scene of Incident, Investigative Interviews, the Collection of Evidence and the Involvement in the Judicial Process, within nine months for Inspectorate officers and SGTs or 12 months for Police Constables (PCs). Then the Inspectorate officers, SGTs and PCs who have completed the WPL will be respectively awarded the Advanced Diploma in Leadership and Management in Policing (Criminal Investigation), Advanced Diploma in Supervisory Management in Policing (Criminal Investigation) and Advanced Diploma in Policing (Criminal Investigation).

One of the officers who was awarded the Advanced Diploma qualification, IP Ho Chun-yu, said, "It is a challenge for me to conduct the WPL assignments on top of the workload in crime units. So I developed a systematic work schedule, and then maintaining the WPL portfolio became an achievable task." Another officer, SGT Tsang Kwok-shan, said, "WPL has strengthened my supervisory abilities and team spirit. Under the Qualifications Framework, the nine-month WPL enabled me to obtain the Advanced Diploma, which would otherwise take several years to complete."

The accreditation of the SCIC training enhances officers' professionalism in criminal investigation to embrace future challenges in complex policing work.