Letter  

Industrial security: lack of focus on training

In recent times it has been observed that there is a void in training courses conducted by the Industrial Security Foundation of Sri Lanka and the Ministry of Defence.

Perhaps, many institutions believe that reducing costs and other overheads is to stop spending money on training. It is most unfortunate that several institutions in this country including hotels, banks and industrial organizations in the Free Trade Zone and outside, seaports, airports and airlines opt to cut down cost by eliminating training, which updates the knowledge of security staff in their organizations, as they feel the security staff perform a job which is not earning revenue for their organization.

I had the experience when I was Security Manager of a certain food company which was the only food company at that time which did not believe in training programs. An engineer of the organization, who thought he was knowledgeable about security, asked me how many detections are made by the security staff per month. This was a good opportunity for me to explain to him that the main objective of security is prevention.

It is because preventive methods were successful that there were no detections. I also challenged him to withdraw security of his institution for one month to realise what an important function the security staff perform within any organization especially an organization which manufactures and produces food items.

This is the knowledge a layman has about industrial security and I am not surprised.