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Spotlight: Vying for a promotion? TopSpot Training helps cops get a leg up

TopSpot Training’s mission is to help candidates earn the top spot in their promotional interview

Company Name: TopSpot Training
Headquarters: Lodi, CA
Website: http://www.topspottraining.com/
Signature Product(s): “Watch and Learn” and “Live Fire”

TopSpot Training takes a different approach. Your success in the promotional process is important to them, so they won’t bore you with dry lectures or insult you with lousy actors. Instead, they are here to give you the very best law enforcement promotional oral board training available. They have spent years conducting and filming mock oral board interviews featuring real cops answering real questions.

Q&A:

1. Where did your company name originate from?

Before TopSpot Training even had a name, we knew our mission was to help candidates earn the top spot in their promotional interview. We began to use this phrasing more regularly, and the name stuck.

2. What was the inspiration behind starting your company?

As owner of a law enforcement consulting firm, our founder, Richard Dean does leadership, accountability, and assertive supervision courses for police departments nationwide. Over many years, he noticed just how many officers were struggling with the promotional oral board process. The inspiration for TopSpot Training is these officers — candidates who deserve promotion and could benefit from training on just how to get there.

3. What is your signature product and how does it work?

While we offer a great deal more training material, we would say that we have two signature products. The first, called “Watch and Learn,” is a section of our curriculum where members can watch hundreds of videos of real police officers giving good, better, and best responses to difficult promotional oral board questions. Another signature product is called “Live Fire,” in which members can view and answer simulated oral board questions organized by question type, or even take full-length, simulated interviews. The questions are in video format, given by oral board panelists, and allow anyone with a webcam or camera-enabled device to record and save their responses to the questions.

4. Why do you believe your products are essential to the police community?

If a police officer wants a promotion, that officer can expect to have to go through the oral board process. Competition is stiff. We believe our product is essential to the police community because it offers cops all of the resources they need to get a leg up on their promotional interview competition.

5. What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced?

The biggest challenge our company has faced is certainly the completion of all of the front-end work that has gone into building the content of our site. In particular, selecting the best and most useful videos out of the vast amount of training footage we collected was quite a challenge. The majority of our footage found its way to the cutting room floor, but we are very satisfied with the quality (and quantity!) of all the footage we provide.

6. What makes your company unique?

What makes our company unique is just how immersive our training is. With our extensive content and varied curriculum, members can approach their promotional training in any manner that suits their specific needs.

7. What do your customers like best about you and your products?

One of the things our customers like best about us is how intuitive our training content is. While there is a ton of content, it is entirely self-paced, and very user-friendly. We understand that people have different styles of learning and different objectives when preparing for their promotion, and we have something for everybody with an upcoming interview.

8. What is the most rewarding part of serving the first responder community?

Even the most qualified candidates for a promotion often fail to get it because of their poor performance in front of oral board panelists. We would say that the most rewarding part of serving the first responder community is helping those struggling with interview performance to finally earn the promotion that they deserve.

9. Is there any fun fact or trivia that you’d like to share with our users about you or your company?

“TopSpot” is a palindrome — a word that’s spelled the same forward and backward.

10. What’s next for your company? Any upcoming new projects or initiatives?

Right now, one hundred percent of our focus is on helping law enforcement officers ace their promotional interviews. Down the road, we may expand our interview training to help other first responders, like fire fighters and emergency medical technicians, earn promotions in their careers.

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