Tom shares how his various past job experiences helped in his transition to operational work as a police officer.
Video transcript
Literally every day you have no idea what you're going to walk into. You might have all these plans to do all these things for the day and then very serious jobs happening out the road and you've got to go at the drop of a hat.
And I love that part of it. I reckon that's awesome that we have no idea what we're going to walk into every day.
I joined at the very start of 2020. My first deployment was actually in Ballarat, where I spent about six to eight weeks before repositioning to Ararat. I spent two and a bit years at Ararat, and since then I've come back to Ballarat and I've been here about 18 months.
Previous to this I was working as a personal trainer down in Hamilton. From there, I joined a trade being a cabinet maker and I was a cabinet maker joiner for about eight years before joining the job. I spent about 15 years boundary umpiring and central umpiring football in the Australian rules.
Six years down at the VFL and I end up leaving that career to come join Victoria Police. I found a lot of those skills were very transferable especially with dealing with conflict on a football field. And then de-escalating and then moving on with what I had to do.
I love going to major incidents and trying to work out how I can best defuse it. Whether it be, a major family incident or a major collision or something like that. Going from a situation when no one knows what to do, to potentially being the calm in a heated situation.
I think if you can have a honest conversation with someone and even just open up that little bit to someone, It sort of breaks down that barrier. If they've had a good interaction with you, then all of a sudden they're more inclined to trust you on their next interaction if it's in a time of crisis.
I think for me coming to work and noticing that you are making a difference to people. And I might not be at that initial time, they might not realise it, but certainly, I've had times where down the track they actually come to you and say thank you for what you did.
And it might have just been the smallest interaction that you didn't realise, but it's made a world of difference in their lives.
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