Are You Thinking about a Career as Private Investigator or Detective?
Maybe you’re already imagining a business card that would display something like:
Do you fancy solving mysteries? Children have always loved playing detective games, the first of which is the traditional “hide and seek”. By nature, young people have always been adventurous. They love challenges. They find satisfaction in coming up with solutions to everything, which is demonstrated by the fact that some games like “Cluedo” are quite popular.
Mysteries fascinate the human mind and many people enjoy stimulating their neurons with activities like crossword puzzles, sodoku or cracking the scrambled code of a Rubick’s cube. On Television, many of the most popular series involve solving mysteries.
From Mrs. Marple to “Star Trek, The New Generation”, where Patrick Steward, in his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, would take time off in the holo suite as a Private Investigator; stories involving a villain, an unworthy deed, clues and a plot leading to the solution of unanswered questions still abound.
All romantic aspects put aside, if one looks more closely at the core activity of private investigation activities, one common denominator becomes very obvious: this business is about information or the lack of it. The ultimate goal of every investigation is to produce a result, which usually involves providing information and proof.
In the word “detective” one easily recognizes the verb “to detect”, which will cause a cascade of other notions to come to mind like: “to find”, “to uncover”, “to discover”, “to unearth”, “bring to light”, and so on, all of which are about providing someone with an answer to an open question.
The person in the business of providing the service of gathering missing information needs to have a few qualities. Not only will a private investigator need a good analytical mind, he will also need astute powers of observation, a keen eye and memory for detail, above average power of deduction, logical reasoning and patience.
When computers, cameras, videos, microphones, the Internet and many other gadgets have given up their prize of information, it will still need the power of a mind to put all the pieces together so as to offer the conclusion or a result.
A background in criminology is also useful if one wants to make a career as private detective, but often, agencies will prefer people who have experience in military or police activities.
