Continued forensic development - investigation into current trends and proposed model for digital forensic practitioners

• Main Author: Van Ramesdonk, Paul
• Other Authors: Stander, Adrie
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2016
• Subjects: Information Systems; digital forensics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20707

Continuous professional development has been looked at in many professions over the years, most notably in primary and secondary education and in the medical fields. With digital forensics being cast into the limelight due to the rapid advancements in technology, academic institutions have added courses to address the void created by the boom in the industry. Little research has been done to address the issues that have now become apparent concerning continued learning in this field. The purpose of this research was to investigate the kinds of frameworks and methods used in other professions, and how the practitioners themselves see career development, and to create a framework that could be used to keep abreast of developments in the field of digital forensics, be it changes in the law, case law, or changes in software. The data analysis showed quite a number of continued learning approaches that could be employed in the digital/computer forensic fields to achieve the objective of keeping abreast of changes in the field. Some, understandably, are due to the nature of the discipline. As part of practitioners' current approach to continued learning, they rely heavily on knowledge sharing in the form of learning from other professionals, through self-study by reading books, articles and research conducted in the forensic field, the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for education, and the use of Internet sources such as user forums, Facebook groups, and web-blogs. The majority of the respondents had received formal training in digital forensics, and of the total number of participants, only six percent had not been involved in any form of continued learning activities in the past five years. When looking at the data obtained, and because there are no formal requirements to perform continued learning in the digital/computer forensic field, it becomes clear that individuals themselves need to be self-driven to keep up to date with changes in the field. As seen in studies focused on continued learning activities in other professions, the research shows that digital/computer forensic practitioners experience similar barriers to their own approaches to continued learning.