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Credentialing Services Division
Service Time – How Does TCOLE Arrive At My Total?
By Jessica Teseny
Are you evaluating your service time, trying to figure out when you’ll qualify for your next profi-
ciency certificate? There is actually a really easy way to find out how many years of full time ser-
vice you have, but you may be wondering how TCOLE arrived at that total.
Keep in mind that your
service time
and the
number of years you’ve held a license
are different
things. The proficiency certificates are looking for active years of service-that is, the years you
have served actively working for a department in that specific license type.
Say you’re an officer that was issued a license 20 years ago. You worked for a department for 12 of
the 20 years. In this case, your service time is 12 years. Although you received your license 20
years ago, the time you spent actively working within that license was 12 years. So, when we look
at your service time to see if you qualify for the master certificate, we will only take the 12 years
into consideration.
Another point to consider when calculating your service time is whether or not you had overlapping
service or dual appointments. Service time that runs concurrent with another service for a different
department, but for the same license type, is only counted once.
This happens when an officer works a dual appointment, or at two or more departments at the same
time. For example, Department A held your commission on reserve status for 2 years. During that
time, you worked for Department B part-time for 1 year. When you look at your record, you see
both departments listed in your service history with their own start and end dates. At first glance, it
looks like that should total up to 3 years. But, since 1 of those years overlapped another, you’re ac-
tually looking at 2 years of service.
The next thing to consider is that service time is not cumulative across all license types; service as-
sociated with each license is counted separately. Peace Officers, Jailers, and Telecommunicators
each have different requirements for their respective proficiency ladder. Someone holding more
than one license type must follow more than one set of requirements to advance in proficiency.
So, a peace officer who also holds a jailer license cannot add their 4 years of jailer service to their 2
years of peace officer service to make 6 total years. The 4 years of jailer service is counted sepa-
rately from the 2 years of peace officer time. To the same extent, qualifying for the advanced jailer