FBI Academy Career Tracking

Everyone hired by the FBI goes to the Academy. Once accepted, they train you in everything. You'll take law classes and everything that the FBI investigates. You'll be trained in self-defense and firearms and many other areas.

Starting about a year ago the FBI began career tracking new agents in the academy. The FBI designates people into specific programs, such as counter terror, counterintelligence, criminal investigations, cyber crime and others. The idea is that those agents will work that program for the entirety of their career. People create an expertise or specialize in an area versus bouncing around doing different things, never becoming acclimated to what they are doing. Once someone is career tracked, that person develops an expertise and applies it to what they are working on, at least that is the idea.

The FBI found that people that go to college develop certain skills by studying a particular major. Those people are trained in thinking a specific way. By hiring people that have these diverse backgrounds and training and then career tracking them into certain areas, the FBI is creating a diverse group of individuals with specialized techniques and knowledge that can function together and bring different ideas or theories to the table during an investigation.

For example, the FBI wants accountants to work corporate fraud and white collar crime. The accountant is the only one that can find out what's going on and they devote their career in that area, so that they are the experts and know the crimes better than the ones attempting the crimes.

No matter what your background is, PhD, Bachelor's, you speak arabic better than anyone else, or you have a degree in liberal arts, everyone gets paid the same. There are no enhancements for special skills at all. Everyone is at the same level.