Dr Flavius Akerele III's The E Team Education blog

Policemen need to be perfect; this is a simple truth. Imperfection in a job that can cost people their lives, has no place. Sorry but that is absolute the truth, so if you are not hiring the best educated, the most honest people, you are doing society a disservice. If you are not instilling the “civil service” part and the “public safety” part, you are being criminal. An airline pilot that accidentally crashes planes will not be a pilot for long, a doctor or nurse that accidentally kills patients will probably be prosecuted and certainly sued. Heck, teaching is a profession where we acknowledge and embrace mistakes, teachers get vilified, hounded, sued, and prosecuted for things that would not make the news if they were not teachers. Bus drivers that crash, taxi drivers that drive drunk, train conductors that derail trains; all these people would lose their jobs and probably be in jail. How come a police officer that kills people is exempt? Police get exonerated because...

Most jobs today are going to come from connections and networking; who you know really does matter. However, that does not mean you do not have a shot at an open position, and that is where recommendations come in handy. Specifically, timely and relevant recommendation. I cannot count the number of times I have been asked to write a letter of reference, and my rules on this are simple: 1.       Please give me a template on what they are looking for so I can properly frame the recommendation 2.       Try and avoid asking me for a last-minute letter of references/recommendations 3.       If I say yes, I will do it almost immediately. The last part is important because someone’s application could be getting held up because of that one letter of reference, especially when computers are tallying up everything nowadays. Having experienced that particular phenomenon, I can tell you it is not a ple...