Tom Mulhall is the Director of the Postgraduate Programme in Security Management at Loughborough University – but as he tells Mark Rowe, he’s still learning, too.
Now nine years at Loughborough, Tom Mulhall reports a change in the intake of security management distance learning students. No longer is it the stereotypical middle-aged white male, perhaps coming to private security as a second career – ‘and there’s nothing wrong with that,’ Tom adds. ‘But now I’m noticing we are getting a lot more ethnic minorities, and they are a lot younger as well, people in their thirties.’ And women too. ‘And they have all got the same aspirations in mind, to build a career in security. A lot of these people are in at ground level, perhaps working as a guard for contract companies and they have wonderful aspirations to make security their career.’ From the sound of it, besides being uplifted by the variety of intake, Tom was learning himself, besides teaching? He agreed. Part of the course is to do an assignment – an essay – which can be based on an issue in your workplace. So, the thinking is, you work towards your qualification and your employer gets something too. Tom enthuses too about the quality of work. "And to me that’s the greatest pleasure of all, people who have perhaps never studied at university level; lots of people may have left school at 16, 17, perhaps not even with an O level; and to see them come on to a programme like this and do extremely well, and produce very good quality work. That’s the buzz for me, to see these people perform and come out with a [masters] degree." <br><br>We chatted about a couple of the assignments – first, Ian Houston’s about what training there is for UK security practitioners, featured in the August issue of Professional Security Magazine (‘We can gain more than box-ticking’) and in full on the website. Tom took up the thrust of the findings; querying all the money and time and effort spent by security people on various qualifications; who are the courses recognised by, what are the pieces of paper you get at the end worth? As Ian Houston wrote, if you the student get what you want out of a course, and feel you have value for money, fine. But Tom bangs the drum for a university course, formal, accredited, with a known standing in the UK and the world. <br><br><br>It depends what you want of a course, like anything else. Do you want to say you have a university diploma or add the letters MSc to your business card? Do you want to think in a more rigorous, business-like way, like other managers in your organisation? Measure yourself against your peers? Here Tom takes up another assignment topic, as to whether security will become a proper profession, like the law, or accountancy, or medicine. Managers with security degrees, as common as doctors or lawyers with degrees? A code of conduct that, if you breach it, you are ‘struck off’ and can’t find another job? Tom does not see it coming soon. That said, Tom does make this point: "People think it’s easy to do security; it isn’t. And I think it’s very often because security people make it look so easy, and they under-estimate their abilities." If a head of security is dealing with a HR or other manager, who has a MBA or first degree, and the security person has none, it can take a security or risk MSc for the security manager to realise: hang on, I am on a par with you. <br><br>Universities like Loughborough – and to be fair, there are others, such as Leicester and Portsmouth, each with their own slants that may appeal depending on your background or academic interest – are offering besides the ‘contact time’ with an academic institution more subtle things: networking, for example. Loughborough runs a quarterly security forum for past and present students: the next runs, at Loughborough, on October 22, ‘run by the students for the benefit of the students’, Tom adds. ‘I learn a great deal from it.’ Speakers and visitors chew over the issues of risk and security management – investigations; corporate manslaughter; tiger kidnaps; data protection. Talking of subtle offerings: it’s something for anyone to stand up and speak to their peers, even about their own work, and take robust questioning, albeit to a set audience. <br><br>Much has changed since Professional Security last interviewed Tom (in 2002). Then he was part of the Centre for Hazard and Risk Management (CHaRM); now, he is in a different, two-year-old building, part of the business school. He’s over the road from a cricket field and the fitness centre as used in midwinter by the England cricket team – not that Tom necessarily knows his Kevin Pietersen from his Monty Panesar; he’s a supporter of Celtic Football Club. Just as the world is moving online, so is Loughborough looking at online essays and marking. As Tom points out, online is quicker, and if students (as some of their email addresses suggest) are in Iraq and Afghanistan, the postal service may not be as reliable as an electronic system whereby the uni can ping an email back to say it’s received your work. <br><br>To skip through what’s taught: business and organisations; criminal law and disciplinary codes; risk management and planning; physical security; fraud; IT security: "… and the whole idea is to teach people, in my view, how to think, and how to give them a greater appreciation of security." And that’s security as a business-enabler. He gives the example of CCTV – if someone says, that’s what your site needs: well, what exactly are you trying to do? Is CCTV the proportionate tool? Is its use legal, even? Does it lead to lazy policing? So the Loughborough course is not the same as criminology, which by the way has become popular with teenage undergraduates, who have seen forensic science in TV dramas. Whichever uni’s course you choose, it’s difficult, as Tom says – and he speaks as a man with a background in investigations in the Royal Mail then British Telecom. He went into teaching after he did the sort of courses he is now in charge of. "It’s a matter of managing your time and your domestic arrangements." Yes, by doing distance learning, you still earn your living and you don’t fall a couple of years behind in your career, but you have to read the books and write the essays at weekends, in your holidays, when you can find the spare time (and the brainpower). Is it for you? Have you got the stamina (and money)? To find out more, you can ring or email Tom, or indeed ask students how and why they did it – Mike Bluestone, The Security Institute chairman and vice-chairman David Gill are two Loughborough alumni. <br><br>Visit the Loughborough business school website –
