How to get on? So much flows from that short question – what is it inside yourself that motivates you to leave the house in the morning (or at night) to go to work; and how do you position yourself compared with others to avoid the sack at minimum, and land more senior and higher-paid jobs if you have the ambition? Mark Rowe writes.
I’ve come across separately two security managers who are or have taken a specialist turn in their careers, towards emergency or business continuity (BC) planning. Like much in life, it’s for push and pull reasons. The pull, as one of them explained, is towards BC planning. As head of a security department, you may be doing planning as well, whether it’s in your job specification from the start or after an incident you find that the responsibility is placed upon you. In other words, two jobs not one, and you are still only paid the one wage.
So why not do only the one? The push may be literal, and applies to close protection work also. As you get older, do you still want to do the front-line work – even if only to fill in a shift otherwise not filled, or to keep an eye on the site, or to show security officers that you are approachable. Do you have the energy still to want the unsocial hours, and the possibility of rolling on the floor with an intruder, a drunk or thief?
Such a career shift allows also to avoid staleness. It can mean exposing yourself to new ideas or applying old ones (the three by three or five by five risk matrix) in new ways; to seeking further qualifications, if you retain the appetite for that; and to joining new associations and taking new directions generally.
It would be idle to deny that money comes into any job decision, whether to stay or seek to move. No law says that you cannot move for similar or even less money (although if a recruitment consultant is trying to convince you to make such a career-sideways move, arguing that it will look good on the CV, or will stand you in good stead, consider: are they saying that because what really matters to them is that you do take the job, so earning the consultant a four-figure sum in bonus that he is counting on to pay his mortgage?!).
Staying put is fine; what matters is the reflection, even if only to confirm that you feel well off as you are. Another motivation may be to seek validation, whether by adding initials after your name, as a member of an association or some academic qualification – which may or may not make a difference when you seek to change job – or by seeking to win an industry award. In an association or for a postgraduate or further education qualification, as in so much of life, it’s true to say that you get out what you put in. You may feel like some non-security recreation – to quote only recent examples featured in interviews of security people in Professional Security Magazine, volunteering to be a youth football coach, or referee; or a school governor. Recreation in its Victorian sense; you do some evening or weekend pastime, so as to recreate yourself, to resume work refreshed, and with renewed perspective.
