Firearms Training Records

The National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) have implemented more stringent controls on the training of firearms officers in order that any organisation training firearms officers can be certain that every officer has received all required training for every deployment they go on.

The Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) have the second largest number of authorised firearms officers in the country, behind the Metropolitan Police. They developed their processes to ensure they meet the NPIA’s requirements and they asked me to work with them to develop an interim solution which was robust, easy to use, and reliable to record this information. This was given with the limitation that it must be done in Excel. Any solution also needed to take into account the following standards; internal policies, ISF Standard of Good Practice for Information Security and ISO 15489.

The solution was achieved through the use of Excel’s built in functions and with a lot of Visual Basic for Applications code which cycled through the reams of data to summarise it in a way which could be easily read.

Despite this being an interim solution to show the NPIA that the CNC are continuing to improve their processes our solution was so successful that it is now being considered as a permanent solution. This was achievable thanks to the computer coding behind the Excel spreadsheets with which I could carry out functions Excel is not able to do.

I am proud to have been asked to carry out further work for the Civil Nuclear Constabulary.