Determination of the scope and main components of forensic experts’ professional competencies

Abstract

Implementing forensic expert activity in any expert direction requires a certain amount of knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary and sufficient for providing an objective and substantiated specialist opinion. During the years of the pandemic and military actions in Ukraine, there was a significant shift in the education format from the traditional offline form to online. Currently, we are witnessing an increase in opportunities to acquire professional knowledge and skills through education and advanced training at various courses and workshops conducted by domestic and foreign subjects of educational activity and professional institutions. In our opinion, the old paradigm of training forensic experts with the definition of requirements for appropriate higher education availability in modern conditions needs to be revised. Approaches to obtaining (upgrading) qualifications should take into account modern trends; in particular, recognize not only the results of formal education obtained in educational institutions but also certain results of autodidactism and informal education. When determining experts’ scope of professional competencies, we consider it expedient to take into account both documents on higher education and practical experience in a certain field of science, technology, art, or craft. For the purposes of forming of the document: «The Handbook of Forensic Experts’ Professional Competencies», the norms of which can be taken into account when training experts and obtaining (confirming) their qualifications, professional competencies are proposed to be divided into 4 main levels: general competencies — fundamental for the effective conduct of forensic examinations in all expert specialties; special (basic or professional) competencies — focused on the specifics of the relevant (basic) field of science, technology, art or craft to which the studied objects, phenomena, and processes belong; specialized (subject) competences — specific competences necessary to provide qualified and objective expertise in a certain expert specialty; personal (individual) competencies — can be acquired as a result of the accumulated practical experience of forensic expert activity, as well as formal education, informal and autodidactic education.