CVF, MLF or PPF: What’s Your Framework?

“It’s what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde

There are now three different police promotion frameworks in use across the UK, assessing officers for promotion to the roles of Sergeant and Inspector. I’ll start straight off by providing a quick summary and infographic for each, including links for more detail…

CVF

Competency & Values Framework (CVF): Used as-is or in various forms by most forces outside the Met, since being relatively recently introduced by the College of Policing.

MLF

Metropolitan Leadership Framework (MLF): For promotion processes in the Met Police (example of Constable to Sergeant promotion pack).

PPF

Policing Professional Framework (PPF): Still used by a number of police forces, until they move to CVF by Spring 2018.

Most cops would probably live three lifetimes before choosing to purposefully read through a promotion assessment framework.

Whether that’s the CVF, PPF or the MLF, it can be dry stuff. But, and this is a very a big BUT: if you aspire to promotion and want to be successful, the most valuable action you can take now is to familiarise yourself now with the promotion framework your force uses.

The reason for this is simple. It’s jam packed full of golden nuggets of information to help raise your awareness. It describes what ‘good’ looks like and provides guidance to help align your promotion evidence (for applications or interviews).

A Picture Says 1000 Words

I encourage officers to read all three promotion frameworks. Why? Because doing so provides different perspectives on the rank/role you are aiming for and helps you to recognise similarities and differences.

And yet many candidates attempt a promotion process without even a rudimentary understanding of their promotion framework, often overlooking what is a precious source of information.

It is important to study the framework to ensure it makes sense to you. You will then be able to align your evidence to each behavioural competency, then importantly refer to it from memory during a promotion interview.

Having studied these for myself in depth towards supporting officers from around the country, it struck me just how much guidance there is for candidates to take wade through, with documentation amounting to 1000’s of words. ‘Go read it!’ is of course obvious advice, but I wish to add value for my clients and so created the original infographics above to distill and simplify for aspiring Sergeants / Inspectors. If you’re interested, here is an early sketch…

Putting Pen to Paper…

You can see my personal interpretation of each framework in my newly revised comprehensive digital promotion application and interview guides. This includes my new FREE guide and workbook to help you compile your police promotion evidence to the rank…

Wherever you are on your promotion journey it’s never too early to get ahead!