I’ll definitely check out DCSA to see if they have openings. SCIS finally emailed me back last week and said that I wasn’t selected for the position in DC. Maybe due to the large amount of investigators that applied? Meanwhile, also looking at other jobs outside the field.
It’s not difficult. Just look up your state. I do think its BS though. They went you to do this to protect themselves. And with the 1099, you don’t have any medical benefits. You also don’t get paid mileage. Yes, you can deduct it, but that is a pretty high amount. They are making so much money of the the 1099’s employees.
When did you interview with SCIS? I interviewed at the beginning of August and have heard nothing. Tried to reach out to that KB person who was active on this site and crickets. I understand that everyone is busy but a simple email saying no would be great.
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That’s not unusual, the process takes a while.
Setting up an LLC is about a s much work as establishing a new email account. Every state is a little different but there’s not much to it. Look online. Get a good tax person and you’re good to go.
Trust…? Who cares…they either do or they don’t…some will, some won’t…next
I did talk to the owner of an PI agency who put a message out on FB that they were looking for entry-level people and was interested in hiring me after seeing my resume (which included working for GDIT as a BI), but he suggested that I do the Maryland PI course and give him a call back. Which is encouraging news to me. Right now, I’m in the process of applying for a security guard job just to sustain me and to pay for the course, along with Doordashing.
I interviewed in August, but finally got an email a month afterwards saying that they didn’t select me. Figures. I’ll probably reapply in a week or two from now and see what happens.
Nice! Good luck to you. There’s usually no shortage of PI work and if you’re up to the task of doing mobile surveillance, those gigs usually pay pretty well, at least 20 - 25 an hour plus mileage
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When you say PI are you talking about bail bondsman/bounty hunters, or some other kind of PI work? Here, when someone calls themselves a PI they’re really chasing down bail jumpers. curious as to what other kind of work PI is out there.
Bail bondsman are a whole different animal, but it’s not unusual for a licensed bail bondsman to also be licensed as a private investigator. Some states require licensing, some don’t. Depending on the state, you may need to have some law enforcement or investigative experience in addition to passing an exam. If you don’t have the experience you have to operate under an apprentice license which requires a basic course that needs to be completed.
There are numerous types of work for private investigators. Surveillance is a big thing in the industry, ranging from working infidelity cases to working for insurance companies. Insurance companies employ investigators for cases where fraud is suspected and a large amount of money is about to be paid to an individual who is faking an injury. There are PI’s who specialize in corporate investigations and ones that specialize in accident reconstruction. It can be a relatively broad field
Have been cleaning up these GD cases now the last couple of weeks and wow, I’ve never seen such sloppy work.
These are way worse than the USIS cases I cleaned up.
WTF.
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There was very little oversight, it was ridiculous.
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I can tell you what happened, the staff lost faith, so investigators stopped doing the work. They told people a month in advance they were leaving the industry. What did they expect? Some cases were done and not typed because they sent people tdy literally the week before the end of the contract but only gave them three days to type it up. But GD has a lot of new investigators who had absolutely no clue what they were doing. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they had trash reports!! Training for this new wave of investigators was horrible. If they were lucky enough to go to CACI or PERSPECTA, I guarantee you they are struggling. The training department had brand new trainers who knew nothing then expected us as mentors to work magic in two weeks. Some of the NIT Investigators were failing the exam, and they were letting them retake it one and two times. I would fail people during mentoring, and it didn’t matter they were still brought on! So nope, it doesn’t surprise me at all.
Edited for typo
It’s been going on for a long time. Back in the day in the early 2000s I was a BI at USIS and there were times I was doing the initial applicant interview for prospective BIs. I would not recommend but would be overruled. A warm body was all that was wanted. Brain activity was secondary.
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You’re spot on… I’m not gonna lie and don’t particularly care if it sounds unprofessional but I definitely left a case or two untyped or half-assed and I know for a fact I’m far from being the only one who did that.
I was investigator with several years of experience and now I’m sitting at the house looking for work because GDIT was worried they’d make $3bn in profits instead of $3.1bn.
I was in the last few days of a TDY when they announced they were killing our jobs. They told us to put all fieldwork on hold so I cancelled the rest of my appointments and spent the last couple days of my TDY enjoying some NorCal beaches and doing some sight-seeing. Before I even got home they started taking cases out of my units… cases I flew completely across the country to work. They told us we could ask for them back if we needed to type so that’s what I did. When the cases were returned I got an email saying they’d give me a single day to type up the half-dozen or so subject interview cases so I said to hell with it and just let them have them back without typing a single word. I wasn’t about to pull an all-nighter for that company so I worked on my resume and drank a beer instead. None of the individuals I interviewed were waiting on me to get a job and the worst that happened is that they had to be interviewed again so I don’t feel bad.
As far at failing people in NIT… I too was a mentor had the exact same thing happen. There were two sisters that myself and one of my teammates mentored and we both agreed that neither sister should be released to the field after roughly 6 weeks of mentoring, but whatever… they let them pass and needless to say but they were ALWAYS at the bottom of our monthly stats emails… that is until they were laid off in the first wave early this year.
I’m not so sure that the training team didn’t know anything because to be honest a lot of them came from CACI or other vendors… I think the issue was greed. The higher ups wanted to push through way too many bodies and if you’ve ever been involved in education at any level you know larger classroom sizes never benefit anyone that’s actually there to teach or learn. I can’t even imagine what it was like for that small training team to have to fight through all the IT issues and logistics problems with PIV cards, badges, etc for the large classes that were back to back to back.
I agree with buddah. I too was on TDY to SoCal when they gave me my two weeks notice and told to “enjoy myself”. I still did interviews but they snatched some of them before I could finish.
Training was hit or miss, I had mentee that came out that were great and some that were horrible. I did remedial training for one lady TWICE a year after she started. Why they didn’t just left her go idk…
Straight up, it is my opinion that GDIT’s training regimen is mostly to blame. You can argue the point that “I personally made it through fine, why can’t anyone else?” Well let me ask some hypothetical questions. If you have 10 investigators out of 50 in a class that get it and do great, while the rest struggle to some degree and eventually quit or get fired, would you really consider that a success? Bump that number up to 20. What about now? Success or no? 30? Where do you draw the line. If the quality of the training is where I expect it to be, those 10/20/30 investigators should really be 40 or 45 (save 5 or 10 that are either bad apples or clueless because there are always a few). It seemed GDIT didn’t care who was clueless and who wasn’t, they wanted bodies in the field as soon as possible, as alluded to in other posts. The standard was already set so low.
Let’s also examine GDIT’s structure of training, which, granted, is not much different than other vendors. GDIT’s program was split up into three parts: 3 weeks online, one week in-house, and 2 weeks with a mentor. I personally think the 3 weeks online were a lot of information but nothing too difficult. If you failed that open book test, that’s on you. I would agree that you shouldn’t move on. However, remember, there is no context to that information. You don’t get the bigger picture until class and your mentor. That means the in-house class and your mentor are your most important parts of training. It is where you apply the knowledge of the previous three weeks and put everything into perspective. This is where I think GDIT failed, and failed miserably. I could go into more detail, but I will spare you the essay. Now I am not saying that the investigators shouldn’t apply themselves to the job, because it does take considerable effort on our parts to learn and be proactive. But my point is this: It should not come to the point where you are struggling for a year to understand the job, having countless reopens and arguing with reviewers over who knows the SOPs more. Those reopens even hurt the company’s image, so it behooves me as to why the training was so inadequate. Yes, you will encounter obstacles and mistakes and learn through trial and error, but they made it way more difficult than it needed to be. There were simply too many inconsistencies and lots of miscommunication. I can tell you that the more inconsistencies and ambiguities I found, the more the seed of doubt grew. Once the seed is planted, it’s hard to retract.
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It’s amazing some of the types of people they would hire for this position. Last year I trained an individual fresh out of the military and I’m not even joking when I say that this person barely knew how to read. It was painful watching them stumble through asking questions in an ESI, while the subject would watch in amazement wondering if it was a joke.
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Thank you guys! I’ve been doing this job for a very long time! I have mentored a lot of investigators. I can say without hesitation that some of the people that came out of GDIT training will struggle. Now I’m glad that you made it through “fine” but that’s not the norm! In regards to the cases, I personally wasn’t messing up my integrity to turn a case in half done! If I couldn’t do it under normal circumstances then I wasn’t going to do it then! I too stayed until the end. There were cases that needed follow-up and management told us NOT to schedule out the leads and the. Two days before we were done, they said never mind! It was at that point that I said they are playing games. Well long before then but you get the drift. They didn’t handle that exit program correctly! You don’t piss off the workforce! So Again I’m glad it worked out for some of you, but I do know what is the right way. I mean let’s start with the majority of y’all didn’t even do a mock subject interview. You did one question. God forbid if you got 13B. You all came out of training not even knowing what to do. I could go on and on…