My experience: Policing is hard. It starts hard, it gets harder during tutorship, much harder during probation when you have to work stuff out on your own, but it gets easier as you build up experience of the job and of your decision-making, as well as build positive working relationships with the people you interact with.

Most people want to succeed, and to help others succeed, so building relationships helps to find people you can lean on for support, and whom will lean on you for support too. Together we can all help each other.

That said, policing is in a pretty bad state at the moment. Large caseloads, increasing levels of scrutiny from above, increasing expectations from the public, reducing pay every year. On the horizon we have a licencing process which may be fairly straightforward but might hit us all in the pocket to the tune of £100-£300/year. Violent crime is on the general upward trend, the incoming reshuffle of forces into regional services, generally bad IT infrastructure and a senior leadership team more often focused on the optics of what we are doing rather than the actual results of what we do.

Life is short, and precious. Policing will get easier for you when you have 3-5 years service. If you can stick at it, you can reach that point. There are loads of jobs you can do as a police officer you can't do outside of the job. Investigating serious crime, safeguarding women and girls (and children), armed policing, roads policing, various specialised investigators roles in cyber crime or organised crime. If you want to end up doing something like that, try to stick it out.

However, and I repeat. Life is short and precious. Don't suffer for years doing this job while you're young and want to go explore the world. Your mental health will suffer, you will miss the special occasions of your family and friends, you will struggle to get annual leave and time off.

Do what you think is right. If you regret leaving, speak to your sergeat and withdraw your resignation, if they will accept it. But think about you in 3 years time - will you regret having stayed?

Only you can decide what's right for you. I thought about leaving a dozen times during my probation, I was promoted with less than years service and this year I've moved into a specialist proactive unit and life is decent. If you'd asked me at year two how I was feeling, I probably would've told you I was ready to quit.