The Canadian Security Salary Survey, sponsored by the Canadian Society for Industrial Security Inc. (CSIS), was conducted between March and May of this year and garnered responses from 350 security professionals coast to coast.

The most common salary band for full time security workers (15.2 per cent of responses) is $60,000 to $70,000, followed by $50,000 to $60,000 (13.5 per cent) and $70,000 to $80,000 (13.2 per cent). Eleven per cent of full time respondents make more than $100,000 annually. Ten per cent of full time respondents said they make less than $30,000 a year. For part-time, occasional and seasonal workers, 39 per cent make less than $30,000 a year, 22.2 make $30,000 to $40,000, and the remainder make between $40,000 and $80,000.

When asked what their biggest occupational safety concern is, 52.7 per cent of respondents said training. (The second biggest concern was contagious disease at 41.8 per cent.)

Lack of training is a persistent problem in the security profession, says Brian Robertson, president of Diligent Security Training and Consulting Inc., particularly at the guard and junior management levels of security. The biggest impediments, he says, are cost and time.

It’s hard to make a case for training expenditure, he says, particularly when 2009 budgets are already feeling the pressure due to the economic downturn. And, particularly for guards who work on an hourly or part time basis, training can be difficult to schedule.

“There is always some element of perception that training is a cost centre, not a revenue centre,” he says, adding that there is a temptation to cut training costs to save money in the short term rather than look at the big picture and consider training an investment in the future.

There is also a general perception that training may only encourage an employee to leave. With improved skills, that person could look for a higher paying job at a different, possibly rival, company.

“They say, ”˜I’m not going to spend money on training people who won’t stick around,’” says Robertson. “But of course, not having the training makes the employment experience less pleasant for the person, so that contributes to the fact that the person decides they don’t like it here and they leave. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of us have tended to find it hard to break out of that cycle.

“It takes a lot of courage to say, ”˜I’m going to invest in more training to try to get the turnover cycle to slow down.’”

Associations like ASIS are also confronted with the training issue, particularly as it relates to certifying security professionals. Patrick Ogilvie, president of the Toronto chapter of ASIS wasn’t surprised that 64 per cent of survey respondents say they do not have some kind of security designation or certification. “I thought it would be higher,” he says.

ASIS administers the Certified Protection Professional certification for its members. The ASIS website claims that almost 10,000 security professionals hold the designation worldwide, but Ogilvie, himself a CPP holder, says that number could be higher. The main impediments are — as with other forms of security training — time and cost.

“Maybe it’s overwhelming. Maybe it’s simply a lack of understanding of the time commitment and the immense amount of material that certification exams are drawn from. It’s absolutely massive. But that’s what provides credibility to the program, in my opinion,” says Ogilvie.

“Just the course alone is 24 hours, but they could easily put in 100 hours of reading even before setting foot into a review class.”