Security officers’ attitudes towards training and their work environment

A body of research has examined the nature of security work, legislative efforts and training requirements. Fewer studies, however, have explored security officers’ perceptions of the training they received to perform their duties effectively. Although effort has been made to explore how useful the extant of training regime is for security officers in Canada (Manzo, 2009), it is unclear whether such views would hold among security officers in the United States, as both countries have minimal standard requirements regarding training. Building from Manzo’s (2009) research, we use in-depth interviews with 19 US security officers to explore security officers’ perceptions of training and what, if any, additional training security officers perceive that they need to perform their job effectively. Similar to Manzo’s work, we found that some of the officers improvise the needs and demands of their jobs with experiences drawn from prior employment; however, unlike Manzo’s study, security officers perceived a lack of adequate training to perform their tasks effectively and strongly endorsed the importance of and need for systematic and standardized training.