Professionalism

Today in modern security, the lack of professionalism. Professionalism is very important and should be the main subject for security to learn. Most of security guard’s learning experience is on the job anyway, focusing on soft skills would be more functional understanding their job. Why is this? Unarmed security work is customer service, plain and simple. 

Why do I say this? Outside of emergency situations like fire, crime, and medical emergencies; Security guards are merely providing customer service for anyone in the facility. From helping with directions on a directory map to simply knowing where the bathroom is. When “policing” the facility, security guards are enforcing policy and in lot of cases the policy is put in place for public and staff safety purposes. If that is the case for a majority of security work, having soft skills and unwavering professionalism is a must and paramount. 

First, what are soft skills? It can be argued how many there actually are, we will focus on what would be the top three soft skills needed in security/customer service. Big one, teamwork; Teamwork or being able to work on a team, or even having a team mindset. It would be advantageous to mindful that not are you on a team, everyone on the team depends and should have a reliability to lean on each other when necessary. Unless it’s an overnight position, your usually working with many different personalities and tolerance levels, being able to navigate that is easy when you understand and believe in teamwork. 

Second, to be honest I feel like this one could hold a co captain spot with teamwork. Communication, from both side of communication meaning from communicating to the public properly and listening properly to the public. Active listening is the main tool that should be used in communicating with the public as a security guard, why? We are customer service therefore we are problem solvers. How can you solve a problem, if you didn’t listen enough to analyze the situation to get to a proper solution. Active listening is focusing on the “other” persons problems, and understanding what the person may need! Too many security guard young and old simply “listen to respond”. This creates strife between the public and security every time. 

Lastly, leadership skills which some would think would be the first. It’s not because most security guards don’t have leadership skills, matter of fact most people don’t have leadership skills! In security, those that know understand that management and supervisors set the tone for the site. It is very important that supervisors on site have leadership skills. 

I’m not a hiring manager, but I would think that having leadership skills would be top three also. Leadership skills are having the ability to not just guide the “team” on how to enforce policies, and handle emergency situations, but to be the example. The supervisor is the example of being a leader, and also being an exemplary security guard! This is why the most rare of the soft skills is leadership, surprisingly in my experience; Most supervisors have no leadership skills and are the root problem on the site.