Will you sink or swim?
Today’s security industry faces many challenges. Just as it begins to cope with regulation and licensing, to respond to the extra demands and expectations resulting from the increased terrorist threat, to solve the problems implicit within 21CN and the WEEE directive, to understand the changing roles and responsibilities of employees, and to evaluate the risks of failing to comply with ever tighter health and safety regulations and corporate responsibilities, along comes a world financial crisis and a credit crunch which will almost certainly squeeze margins even tighter than they already are.
So what can security companies do to survive in this current climate? Well, the first option is always to make short term savings, and training is often high on the list of budgets to be cut when money is tight.
If this appears to be a sensible solution to the problem, consider what happens when your workforce doesn’t have the right skills to meet your customers’ needs. You become less competitive because you have less to offer and therefore find it difficult to justify prices. Your employees become de-motivated through lack of career progression and investment in their future, and this leads to low morale. Demotivated and demoralised people tend not to hang around too long, particularly if they are of high calibre and looking for permanent careers. When people leave recruitment costs increase and overall performance and productivity suffer a downturn because new staff have to settle in, and they may well be of poorer standard than the people they replaced: but the training budget has been cut so they can’t be trained properly, and so the spiral continues downwards. Contracts are lost and you end up playing catch up with your competitors. Maybe that “saving” wasn’t such a good solution after all?
Security is, in the main, a service industry. Service industries rely upon the quality of service they deliver to their customers and this, in turn, means they rely upon the quality of their people. The security industry has a reputation for cut-throat bidding, tight margins, low wages, unsocial hours, insufficient training and, sometimes, poor working conditions. Can it really deliver quality services with that as a business model?
Many companies are reluctant to invest in training because they fear that their staff will then be poached by competitors. This will always happen to some extent, but the fact is that research shows that companies that train their people retain their people.
If you accept that your company’s most important asset is its people, and that people can make or break the organisation, then you should be investing in them: you wouldn’t stop upgrading the technology you need to run your business, so why would you not upgrade your people? “How?” I hear you ask, “When times are this difficult”.
Skills for Security, the skills and standards setting body for the security business sector, are doing all that we can to help employers improve the skills base whilst remaining competitive. We are doing this by identifying funding streams that can alleviate the cost of training, and finding means by which our employers can gain access to them.
Examples of this assistance are the Security Practitioner programme, developed in response to demand from the Guarding industry for a development qualification post-licensing. This qualification is a workplace coaching and assessment programme that provides a meaningful opportunity for security officers to demonstrate their competence and professionalism and gain a formal qualification without disrupting their everyday working routine or taking them out of the workplace. Having identified the need for this development programme, we then successfully negotiated generous funding from government sources, eliminating the cost to both employers and employees.
For the systems sector, Skills for Security operates an apprenticeship scheme that is not just open to school leavers. Employees up to the age of 26 can be eligible to enrol as security systems installation and maintenance apprentices and take advantage of high quality on-the-job training supplemented with technical education via day release enrolment at college. Because this is a government approved apprenticeship programme it also attracts funding to minimise or eliminate the cost to employers.
Skills for Security also participates in regional programmes designed to deliver trained recruits to the security sector. Working with organisations like Jobcentre Plus and the Regional Development Agencies, these programmes are focussed on specific target groups – such as women, older workers or those returning to the workplace – and can provide employers with people who are trained and “job ready”.
Skills for Security is not the only organisation offering skills needs solutions to the security sector. There are a variety of organisations that have expert advisers who will assess your training needs and signpost funding for training. These include Train to Gain, Learndirect, Jobcentre Plus, Regional Development Agencies and local government and offer advice on training from basic skill levels to higher management levels.
By improving and expanding the skills of your employees, you will have added value to offer your clients and investment in training will form part of your unique selling proposition. What’s more, research in different countries consistently shows that up-skilling your workforce has positive effects on morale, customer service and the bottom line – now that’s a sensible solution! If you would like more information with regards to any funding/training options, please contact Skills for Security on 0845 075 0111 or e-mail info@skillsforsecurity.org.uk
