Getting new officers onto the MDT
A new officer who cannot work the MDT files nothing, looks up nothing, and leans on the radio for everything. It is worth an hour of structured training and it usually gets none.
Lookups first
Name, plate, and what each result actually means: warrants, registrations, prior stops, flags. This is the thing an officer does thirty times a shift, so it goes first.
Then reports
Report templates already carry their fields, so training is about which report to file and what belongs in the narrative, not about remembering a format. Attach the civilians and vehicles from the call while it is still open.
Then the things that are easy to get wrong
Clearing a BOLO that is done. Marking a status so dispatch is not guessing. Attaching a report to the call it came from. None of these are difficult and all of them are invisible until somebody skips them for a month.
Make it a course, so it happens the same way twice
Put the above into CDE Academy with screenshots of your own MDT. A new officer works through it before their first shift, and the FTO who takes them out is starting from a known point rather than finding out on the road. See running the FTO program next.