Victoria Police recruit tweeting and YouTubing their Academy training

In a move designed to improve awareness and understanding of the process by which officers are trained (and encourage more quality candidates), Victoria Police is supporting one of its new Academy recruits to tweet their way through training.

Announced in Victoria Police News as The Twittering recruit, Stephanie Attard begun her career as Victoria Police's first recruit tweeter on 7 June this year.

From the article,

Armed with an iPad, 21-year-old Stephanie from Gladstone Park, will ‘tweet’ every day between 7am and 5pm about her time at the Academy.

Stephanie’s Twitter account, http://twitter.com/vicpolrecruit, will be unedited, and all tweets will be straight from Stephanie’s own finger tips.

And it won’t be just the good experiences she will share on her micro-blog - Stephanie will tweet about her good days and her bad.

Stephanie's Twitter account already has over 1,150 followers and she's actively and candidly responding to questions.

Videos of Stephanie's experiences are also being distributed via the VPBlue YouTube channel. Fortnightly videos are planned through the 23 week training process.

This type of approach can be an extremely valuable recruiting tool for any kind of organisation if allowed to be authentic and unscripted (as the Victoria Police effort appear to be).

Victoria Police are now widely using social media tools for community engagement and outreach, including their Twitter account, @VictoriaPolice (with a well constructed Twitter policy here).

They are also very active Facebook participants with both a main Victoria Police Page and a Recruiting forum and hold regular online chats on topics of community interest.