Mark Rowe writes: I’ve written several articles reviewing 2024 in terms of security management; here’s one about what a review could or should mean for the individual. What have you done this year, what were the highlights and lowlights; have you progressed, and whether or not you feel you have – which is not necessarily the same as how you have done, as others would see you – what can or should you do, differently, to make yourself a better or at least more marketable person, in 2025?
New role
An obvious thing to do, to change your working life for the better, is to study – whether to pay for some training course, or self-study; to do something more useful with those Sunday afternoons than gawp in front of the telly, or drink or nap. Like any new year’s resolution, good intent can fade; a Sunday afternoon nap or drink have their attractions. On the principle of ‘a change is as good as a rest’, a new role can look good, added to your CV, bring in some extra money, and give you a taste of something different, whether still inside private security or the proverbial ‘and now for something completely different’.
The US-based security company Allied Universal (G4S is part of it) in October and November held virtual events towards filling 500 positions for the Super Bowl LIX, the final in the annual American football calendar, in 2025 in New Orleans.
Super Bowl weekend runs in different US cities, each year. Steve Jones, global chairman and CEO of Allied Universal, said: “We have people who return annually as part of our Super Bowl security team and others who have parlayed the weekend job into a lifelong career. We have countless examples of individuals who began as a security professional and are in senior leadership positions today.”
The UK equivalent could be stewarding at football or rugby grounds; renting an allotment; doing some volunteering at your child’s school.
New skill
Britain’s vocational training has been in a state forever. After a recent inquiry by the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee, its chair Baroness Taylor of Bolton commented that ‘apprenticeships and training programmes are not meeting the UK’s future skills needs’. As ever, if you want something doing properly, do it yourself. Once you’ve gone past the age of compulsory schooling, whether at 16 or 18, you ought to direct your own learning – even academic courses will largely require you to do that, for all the money spent; you can easily pay a five-figure sum for a master’s degree course, such as Coventry University’s new Protective Security and Resilience MSc. That’s not meant as a criticism of Coventry or any university; simply, that if you are taking further or higher education, at whatever age, you get out what you put in; teachers and lecturers can only do so much for you. Rather than ask what subject you should study (the typical question of a 16-year-old about to choose A levels, and an 18-year-old before a first degree), you should ask what it’s for: to look good on a CV, to give you particular knowledge, or to take your mind to places it’s never been yet are intriguing? Whether to inform your job, or quite the opposite.
For example, Merseyside Violence Reduction Partnership (VRP) is offering free to the public sector in the region ‘Trauma Informed Awareness training’. It begins with our brains and vulnerability; what impact trauma can have on the brain, and the body, and how that might come out in a real world scenario. It teaches ‘trauma informed practice’ – such things as compassion (including for yourself); ‘cultural humility’ (put another way, the leaving of assumptions at the door). To pinch a metaphor from the training, security is a boat, that allows people to ‘set their sails’, to do whatever it is they want in life. While that’s a far cry from locking gates, checking passes and applying handcuffs to shop thieves in-store, it does reflect what Prof Richard Overy expressed in his 2024 book Why War?: that security (for nation-states) is a state of mind, besides physical fortifications on borders.
If you want to take your career into more of a cyber direction, or merely understand the online world’s risks, equally it can be a mistake to assume that the learning is merely technical – what this product or that does. Cyber-security is always about sorting the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise; once data has been sifted, ultimately a human decision is required, based on the information; for example pay a ransom to a ransomware criminal. Management of cyber like any other branch of security or any other function is partly about making a convincing argument to a board for more budget or staff. It’s also about an appreciation of the human dilemmas that require an ethically-based decision; whether to report a colleague for wrong-doing, for example; or to take intellectual property with you from one job to the next. It’s striking that Ed Skoudis and Dr Paul Maurer, the American authors of The Code of Honour, a book about ethics and cyber, in an accompanying, free to download cyber pledge document use such words as dignity and respect, trust, and respect for privacy.
A review of yourself, then, has merit in itself. Nor need it lead to you doing anything different, so long as you have reflected on what you do, and why you do it.
