Repayment/commitments

Does anyone know the different repayment agreements for training/clearance with NBIB vendors? I know Perspecta is 1 year or $8700 repayment, does anyone have info on CACI, SCIS and General Dynamics? I am hoping others have a shorter time and/or less repayment amount.

The one year commitment is the standard. I don’t know of anyone that actually held someone to that repayment.

Is anyone else aware of anyone having to pay the fee?

General Dynamics does not make any of its employees repay training. CACI and SCIS do. I’m not not sure of the prices.

The job is not worth it. Complete time suck. I have also heard of a big slowdown across the board.

Unless this is your only option (the Army told you no) then don’t do it.

Can you elaborate on why you feel the job is not worth it? I’ve only been doing it for a year and a half but so far this is the best job I’ve had (don’t get me wrong, it has it’s headaches) but the freedom and schedule flexibility is hard to beat. I’m always interested in hearing other peoples experiences with the job

Sideshowbob, if I could interject, there were quite a few reasons why I left.

Training: Listen, I am not expecting the training department to teach every little nuance that could happen on the job, because, let’s be real, it is simply too much. I do expect them, however, to do their damn jobs and not treat us like they are kicking a can down the road. If you can’t accurately teach how to write a report, or what to do when confronting a Subject, then that’s a serious problem, and that is what I ran into. In fact, at least with my company, it was a uniform problem. In addition to those, there were so many discrepancies that, for me, it became a serious trust issue. At the end day, my name is on that report, and I am not taking responsibility for the training department’s incompetence.

Mentor: Going off of the above, I had a mentor who honestly never gave a s***. She was always late to the interviews we did together, and it felt like I was the only one putting in the effort. Coupling that with the fact that the time you spend with your mentor is the most important throughout the training process, you can see where that is an issue.

Quotas: You had to know this was topic was coming. An investigator works in a position impacting national security, which means that should be the first priority, not a quota. We don’t work for a bank and we are definitely not salesmen. As I am sure you are fully aware, there are times where you are pressed to meet that quota in the name of money rather than thoroughness. From an integrity standpoint, I had a serious problem with this. I thought I signed up for national security, but it became apparent that wasn’t the case.

Case Reviewers: It seemed like they were on a different planet. I’m just going to leave it at that.

With all of this being said, and like you said, the flexibility and scheduling is an immense plus to the job. However, in my opinion, those don’t outweigh what I explained above. Being a background investigator is definitely a tough job sometimes, and performing it consistently takes a lot resilience and perseverance. I would give you and anybody else that credit every day of the week and more. But for me, I couldn’t trust anybody to give me accurate guidance, and I wanted nothing to do with the less-than-ethical occurrences I observed.

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