Where does the security profession go next – both as a profession, and for you, in your individual career? Those were among the topics during two days of seminars at the start of the academic year, at the University of Portsmouth for their new and returning risk and security management students, undergraduates taking first degrees and masters degree students.
The event was hosted at the business school building at the University of Portsmouth, pictured. <br><br>Dr Alison Wakefield began day two by asking ‘where next for security professionalism?’, a subject she is due to cover at the Association of Security Consultants’ annual conference, Consec, in London on November 3. How professionalised is private security, she asked, adding that among the requirements are a code of ethics; a knowledge base; a measurable set of competencies; and an ‘educational discipline preparing the student for his functions’. Besides the industry bodies such as ASIS and the Security Institute, there is, by the Worshipful Company of Security Professionals, and managed by the institute, the register of chartered security professionals. (This is separate from the institute’s move towards becoming a chartered institute, to put security on a par with accountants, surveyors and so on.) The register, as Alison Wakefield set out, raised questions as to how you define a ‘security professional’; what experience, competencies and qualifications should they be expected to have? The first ten chartered security professionals (CSPs) were named in May and were featured in the July and August issues of Professional Security. There are now 13; the latest three are Garry Evanson, of De La Rue; Mark Salter of ExxonMobil; and the consultant Stewart Kidd. Visit www.csyp-register.org. Dr Wakefield led a working party that had the task of proposing the framework that led to the register, and a code of conduct that chartered people have to keep to. <br><br>As Alison Wakefield added, professionalism is not in all practitioners’ interest. Some might prefer not to do CPD (continuing professional development). Some might not engage with it for cost reasons; or, if security managers are in a second career and coming towards retirement, they may feel comfortable as they are. Some may be sceptics. She ended by referring to Anthony McGee’s dissertation on corporate security for Cranfield University, in 2006. That defined the five processes of becoming professional: a collective dialogue to establish a shared will among security people; the ‘capacity for occupational negotiation’; defining the boundaries of the profession; making those boundaries, through a qualification; and controlling the supply of those professionals, as a ‘professional monopoly’. To sum up, these five processes are well under way, but there is a way to go. The UK has had specialist security education since Loughborough University launched such a programme in 1989-90, Dr Wakefield recalled. About five universities provide such courses now, and others are entering the market; and there are more specialist courses besides, such as in business continuity management. However security does not have the equivalent of a body as in engineering or psychology that in effect sets what a course has to teach, so that the students on passing the course can do the work. <br><br>Picking up where Alison Wakefield left off was Maria Cox, on CPD and developing your security career.<br><br>Why introduce CPD was a question the Security Institute asked itself a couple of years ago, she recalled. A director of the institute, with a background in teaching, and formerly security services manager for American Express, she has now gone into trade association management, as general manager of the Minor Metals Trade Association. For an institute to do CPD is required as part of the process of becoming chartered, showing that security is like other, more established professions. For the individual, there’s the need to demonstrate not only what you have done, but that you are continuing to develop your skills and competencies. The context, she went on, was the growing complexity and diversity of the security function; many people work across security specialisms; or, security is only part of their job, alongside such disciplines as health and safety, or facilities management. Or, security is part of the risk function. Workers may be required to develop their skills in all sorts of related roles. Mainly, people enter security through a non-academic route, not like the more established professions with a clear benchmark and starting point. Instead, many come to the security sector as a second career, after the military or police, for example; or from IT. How, then, to quantify their development in security, if most do not have a security-related qualification? Maria Cox echoed a point of Dr Alison Wakefield’s that security managers might fear, and resist, change, and ask ‘what about my 30 years’ experience’? The challenge is – to use a term from teaching – to recognise experiential learning as well as academic learning.
Maria Cox described CPD as a ‘currency you can use within your career as it progresses’. Some might see CPD as a chore, a burden, she admitted; how, then, to convince people that they are probably already doing CPD?! The Security Institute was seeking to capture people’s CPD – in their day jobs and outside – and give a value to things people do, rather than burdening anyone. The institute will, as part of its website development, move towards online recording of CPD, rather than the present paper-based recording. (You can download a document about the institute’s CPD from its website.) Within the institute there was a question around whether to make CPD voluntary, or compulsory, for members. While on the one hand supporters valued CPD, on the other hand the Institute wanted members’ buy-in rather than a battle over it. A security manager may say he is in the latter part of his career with five years to go, ‘and you can’t argue with that,’ Maria Cox admitted, though she added that there are still benefits in doing CPD for your job satisfaction and to help younger staff develop. The institute decided that CPD would be voluntary; unless you are going for chartered security professional status; or if you are a student or graduate member. Finally, she spoke of the ‘devil in the detail’. How many points should the institute give to a piece of CPD activity? If you give the same presentation to ten groups, that does not mean you get the CPD points, multiplied by ten!? Do you tick the box that you have sat through a course, or should you be able to prove that you have gained a new skill or learned something new? The institute scores CPD in three ways; for structured learning, such as attending courses, webinars or seminars; self-directed learning, such as reading and visiting trade fairs; and things you do for the wider profession, such as volunteering time to an industry association, or setting and marking course papers.
Why should a security person, or anyone, do CPD? She spoke in terms of CPD as a ‘currency’ again; for example, going through your working life in a single organisation or even career is becoming rarer. With CPD you reflect on what you have done, and show a prospective employer. You may take some part of your job to the next level, for instance by taking some leadership responsibility. If there’s a meeting, you may ask your boss if you can take charge that time; so that, if there comes a time when the boss is away, you have experience. CPD can bring more job satisfaction and keeps you up to date with your job. Nor need CPD take much time and money, if your employer has cut the training budget so that you are not paid to travel to a conference. She stressed the gains from mentoring – both for the person doing the mentoring, and the person being mentored. “It’s a two-way learning process.” Mentoring should not only be for new-comers to private security, because people have milestones through their careers. You may move sideways into a different part of the security sector, say from the public to the commercial side; or you may take new responsibilities. Sharing ideas with someone who has already been through that change can help. The mentee – the one being mentored – if they are taking a risk and security management masters course, may be coming across ideas that the mentor can learn from. And purely by a mentor and a mentee keeping a ‘virtual relationship’ at a distance may help the manager who may more and more have to manage far-apart teams, virtually. As Maria Cox said in answer to a question from Professional Security – asking if CPD is tougher for the security person on their own, rather than someone in a team with colleagues at desks around them – a security manager may be the only one in their organisation or a building. Or, they may be part of a team spread across time zones. “There is a skill to managing teams in that way; it isn’t like managing somebody face to face,” she said. That is, whereas in a face to face meeting you can ‘read’ people’s facial expressions and cues, to check for example that they are truly engaging with you and have understood; you do not have that option in a telephone conference call.
