End-users are concerned that their contract security officers are not receiving the right training to do the job right. That’s the finding of the BSIA’s survey into the Manned Security Market 1999, which was launched at the Changing Faces of Manned Security seminar in November last year.
For the survey, 20 end-users were interviewed in depth about their attitudes toward training and their security staff. All of them said that training would make a difference — 16 said it would make a significant difference to job performance.
Nine of them wanted to see officers perform additional tasks. It’s the verbatim comments that were recorded during the interview that make particularly interesting reading: “How to properly check people entering/leaving the site”, “how to make out a pass”, “how to manage site traffic”, “training in systems”.
Eight respondents wanted their staff to have more training on “how to observe/act”. Verbatim comments included: “How far an office can go and what to do when there is an incident”, “improving powers of observation”, “how to observe and spot thieves”, “How to handle verbal and physical aggression and how to de-fuse difficult situations with the public”.
It’s clear from these comments that a significant number of end-users have strong opinions about the additional training that security officers require.
Are they getting this training? I think we’ve already answered this question — respondents wouldn’t have these strong views if they were.
But end-users want more than just a well-trained bouncer/thug. Sixteen of the end-users want officers who can deal with people. When asked to elaborate they responded with comments like: “very interested in getting contractor to do this training”, “officers must be customer responsive”, “definitely, that’s needed the most of all, it’s the one we have problems with”.
Clearly people skills is something that the general end-user population feels that security officers are lacking. The only other category that received as many affirmative responses was training in health and safety and fire procedures.
Responding to enquiries with care and confidentiality was a key area, with 15 out of the 20 respondents answering that training in this area would be desirable. Asked to elaborate, they said: “this is the most key aspect of all”, “specifically for this company, knowing which employee to refer the enquiry to”, “directing people carefully, politely”, “training in how to maintain confidentiality, to realise the importance of confidentiality”.
The two areas that you might think would be most important for a security officer to be trained in — that is, controlling access and challenging suspects — actually came fourth and fifth in the list. Controlling access was seen to be “key” and “critical” by the respondents.
But it was the subject of challenging suspects that drew more detailed responses: “followed by the ability to provide factual evidence in court”, “important, challenging must be done in the right way”, “dealing with violence, if an officer challenges a suspect, by so doing you can expect aggression/violence”.
Once again, it’s the people skills that are important. But interestingly, on the issue of training officers to challenge suspects, end-users also said: “could be, but I assume the officers are already trained in that” and “difficult to simulate though”. Indeed, just how do you simulate a stressful situation in which you must challenge a suspect? Interestingly, one respondent said that staff were already trained: “how we implement is the problem”.
Training is important. How else do you ensure that a security officer understands your expectations and has been given the skills to meet them? Sadly, all too often training is designed to meet someone else’s expectations, or does not provide the skills that the officer needs to meet job requirements.
Another sad fact to emerge from this survey is that of the end-users who said that training would improve the performance of a number of key jobs, only about half of the respondents said that the training (which costs money) would add value for money to their organisations.
Clearly, they would like better trained officers, but few end-users are willing to pay for it. MSS
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SMT
