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Beyond Death by Video
August 07, 2007
By Sarah Boehle
 It's every trainee's worst nightmare. You report for your first day on the job and spend the next eight hours holed up in a room watching dull-as-dirt new-hire training videos. Even worse, much of the training content is so generic and rudimentary that it doesn’t come close to preparing you for the real-life challenges you'll face in the field.
Unfortunately, for most new hires entering the security-guard services industry, "death by training video" is an all-too-common scenario. Not at U.S. Security Associates, however. In 2005, the Roswell, Ga.-based company discarded its VHS-based training—which it supplemented with face-to-face training whenever possible—and implemented USA Security Academy (Online).
The online academy, says Kelly Murphy, a senior organizational development specialist at the company, makes interactive, personalized new-hire training available to new security guards nationwide through a centralized, video-enabled Web-based platform that delivers live training to the company's various branches. Prior to official hiring, says Murphy, all applicants spend approximately eight hours receiving training via the system. That training, she says, is delivered by one of two dedicated USA Security Academy trainers who synchronously communicate with their students via a two-way video link.
Training recently spoke with Murphy about the program and what makes it work:
Training: Why did you launch the program?
Murphy: One driver was the fact that we wanted our training to become more efficient and cost-effective. Instead of having approximately 110 trainers actively delivering training throughout the country under the old program, for example, we were able to scale that number back to two dedicated full-time trainers, each of whom is responsible for training new hires in up to 50 different branch offices at a time.
Another driver was the fact that we wanted our training to become more consistent and standardized. Prior to implementing the online academy, some of our new-hire training was taking place via VHS tapes, and some branches were supplementing those tapes with live, face-to-face training. Unfortunately, there was no way to ensure that every new hire was receiving the exact same training and material and covering it in the same way.
Finally, most new-hire training within the security industry up until the time we launched the program was very passive in nature. It consisted of outdated VHS tapes and was exceedingly boring. We wanted to make our new-hire training more active and engaging, so that people would actually learn something instead of merely being bombarded with information.
Training: What results has the program delivered to date?
Murphy: By centralizing the new-hire training process, we benefit from numerous functional advantages, including consistency, confirmation of the individuals in attendance, highly collaborative and interactive training sessions, and integrity in the training and testing process.
In addition, the 110 trainers who were no longer needed for training were not laid off. Rather, due to our tremendous growth, their time was allocated to operational processes, resulting in approximately $4 million in reallocated investment. The efficiencies at the learning level also freed up resources at the field level to focus on client satisfaction and growth, ultimately contributing to record-breaking growth without degradation of service. (Client satisfaction and retention remained in the 90 percent range during the first year of the online academy's existence, unchanged from 2004.) Without the efficiencies that resulted from the online training, handling that growth might have been much more tumultuous.
Training: Are there any tips you have for others interested in launching a program like this?
Murphy:
• Be a trailblazer. Even if you're considering a training option that isn't in line with what the rest of your industry is doing, find a program that works for you and don’t worry about what your competitors are doing. In short, don’t be afraid to implement a program that will not only enhance your own training, but also make you "first" in your industry.
• Plan ahead. On the front-end, determine how you will deal with technology hiccups as they arise. At first, when an Internet connection wasn't working at one of our branches where training was scheduled, there was a lot of running around and panic over what we were going to do. Over time, a backup plan was developed to help us deal with such situations. We recorded all of our training and put it on CDs, for example, so that if the Internet is down, our applicants can still receive training at their scheduled time. Instead of figuring things out as we went along, however, we could have avoided a lot of stress if we had developed a backup plan before we launched the program.
U.S. Security Associates provides security guard services throughout the U.S. and is the country's fourth largest security firm. The company, which is headquartered in Roswell, Ga., placed 86th on Training magazine's 2007 Top 125 list, an annual ranking of organizations that excel at human capital development.
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