Understanding data is becoming increasingly important for us all. This is especially true for the intelligence analyst working for a police intelligence unit or business analytics department. The world constantly presents data in data frames or spreadsheets – our daily activities are invariably logged by a time, date, geolocation.

Course overview

The work boundaries of the traditional police intelligence analyst and digital forensic investigator are becoming blurred - today’s analysts need to be cyber aware, understanding how communication records and web search histories can be extracted and analysed.

This course covers these areas as well as theories that provide a better sense of the causes of crime and the prevention measures that can be put in place to stabilise and reverse these trends. Analysts shouldn’t be phased by data simply because of its size, complexity or format. This course provides you with the skills to work effectively with large datasets, allowing you to make more informed decisions in relation to criminal investigations. Key features include writing code to quickly clean up data and packaging it so it’s suitable for analysis and visualisation. You develop these skills along with your confidence in applying them to make more sense of the data – analysing Twitter downloads, searched words and images, geolocation points or big data. You also explore strategies employed in forensic investigation and develop your own area of interest in a research project where your supervisor enables you to maximise your skillsets from academic writing to data analytics.

Career opportunities

You could expect to apply for intelligence researcher and intelligence analyst roles in a wide variety of career opportunities ranging from security, policing and business.