How You Should Promote Your Security Guard Training Culture

In the security guard industry, raising the profile of your guard training culture does more than attract new talent, it also raises employee retention rates, morale, performance, and the overall profile of your company – if done properly.

Now, the key to this is having a robust training platform to begin with. That’s where Defencify comes in. With the quality of our online self-paced training portal, your guards will not only receive the best training based on the most current eLearning standards, but it also serves as a tool to track and report on employee achievements.

Here’s why you should be leveraging that:

Training is one of the few, yet most critical, components of differentiation in a service-intensive industry. It is the one key area for true skills development and career advancement. Go to the website of just about any security guard company and they all claim to offer the “industry’s best training” to draw new candidates, help retain them, and instill confidence in clients considering engaging the firm. But do they really?

The Three Objectives of Security Guard training:

1. Teach candidates the core roles and responsibilities of being a security guard, including understanding the limits of their authority and legal use of force.
2. Meet state licensing requirements for issuance of a valid Guard Card.
3. Communicate internal and HR company policies and expectations for employment (dress, demeanor, timeliness, reporting, etc.)

But your security guard training culture is about more than what happens during an onboarding process. It’s about constantly promoting the necessity of, and sharing the successes of, your officers’ training on the job.

Most security guard firms are either short staffed or too focused on putting out fires to think about the long-term benefits of training.

A Few Ideas to Promote The Profile Of Your Security Guard Training Culture:

• Issue a monthly training newsletter with tips and industry trends. Include sections highlighting the availability of new training courses, a “Profile in Courage” column recounting how one of your officers saved the day at a client location (thanks to effective training), and perhaps a “certification ladder” naming those guards who have achieved the next level in training or have been promoted. Let the whole workforce see everyone’s successes.
  
  
• Publish training roadmaps to show security officers the training topics and milestones they are expected to hit during the first 30, 60, and 90 days of employment (CPR, First Aid, COVID-19, De-escalation, etc.). Clearly outline expectations and “what happens next” so there are no surprises.
  
  
• Communicate these same training milestones to your clients to demonstrate the level of training your security officers must complete before being assigned to their property.
  
  
• Create “classes” of guards based on the number certifications achieved, such as Security Officer Level I, Security Officer Level II, Security Officer Level III, Supervisor, etc. with training curricula assigned to each level. This provides more opportunities to publicly recognize individual achievements.
  
  
• Bring friendly competition into training initiatives. Offer gift cards to the first to complete a certification or the guard who achieves the highest test score. Or have all guards taking a class enter a raffle for a large screen TV.
  
  
• Reward students furthering their law enforcement education with tuition reimbursement for taking outside classes on Homeland Security, TSA training, Forensics, or Criminal Justice.
  
  
• Make sure your training portal tracks the license status and certification renewal dates for all active security officers as part of your compliance program. It should be capable of an email notification process to alert guards to get recertified well in advance of expiration.

Keeping the lines of communication open – both ways – is critical to meeting your SLAs and increasing security officer retention rates. The Defencify online training platform contains several mechanisms to help your guard workforce stay in compliance while building a positive training culture that benefits employees, clients, and ultimately your company.

Contact Defencify to learn more about the industry’s leading self-paced online training platform and start raising the profile of your training culture today