Scab

Welshwarrior;

There are many licensed trades for which the individual has to pay some sort of admin / handling fee for their license and registration. The whole "why pay to work" thing falls flat on its face when we remember that the security is just one single industry which has to pay to work. Its almost like some people in the security industry think they are the only industry treated in this manner!

Now looking at it from the perspective of are we getting the service from the sia we were promised, the promises they actually made fulfilled (no matter how naive), decent enforcement and for them to actually listen to us? They are an abject failure. But lets be honest, are the SIA any more incompetant than any other government department?

welshwarrior37

Hi , Point Taken and granted , Just find these sia courses are so expensive for what they are .Dont get me wrong there are lots of companys i know who run them and have admitted its all about the profit rather than the proffesion as a whole .

Regards and thanks for your input .

AVL

Hey guys give the guy a break, he has been kind enough to post the position and all he has had if flack! For someone who is all ready based in London it is a good bench mark for working shall we say '6months of the year'. Agreed not the best pay, but by no means the worse, but hands up who jumps on jobs for 12 hr days for little more than £100 a day??

Anjee

shakespeare

I think the common theme here is that the sia is a complete failure. The Government knew this before approving SIA launch, but the potential revenue stream for the treasury was too good to miss....

The resultant collapse of wages and professional standards was foretold before launch by many on this forum, training providers, guys on the ground and employers alike. I won't go into too much detail as this has been covered in depth in other threads, but...

Unfortunately, if the time has come to knock CP on the head by some operators in return for secure Hotel jobs etc then good luck to them, at least they aren't offering to work for free or undercutting everyone else in CP.

I wish you all the best mate and hopefully we will see you return to CP when the market stabalises eventually.

Regards

Shakes

Nomad

You are quite right because I am also a qualified electrical engineer and here in NZ I have to do a refresher course very two years as well as a fiRst aid course. To even gain registration you have to do a week intensive course and normally 2 years of logged experience before you gain a licence to work independently (I was exempt from this part because I have 18 years experience in the UK). The course cost over $1000 and my licence costs $90 every year which I have to pay for. All this to be able to open the back of a mains powered item! If I don't I could face a fine up to $10,000 and loss of my licence. Now does this sound familiar?

If you are a plumber, electrician, boat builder etc you all have to go through this and pay for your own training as personal development. The reason for this was to stop cowboys in these industries and while it has not been perfect and rogues still operate at least there is now a framework for recourse of unethical and unsafe practises.

At least with a standard and checks in place it is possible to stop criminal elements from doing this type of work which was the main reason (besides lining the pockets of the government) and after all there were many people working security jobs that were doing criminal activities. Would you want them to remain if there was no standard at all is the question you have to ask?

As for the posted job, yes it isn't great pay but it also isn't the worst I have seen and would be good experience for someone needing a foot in the door into that line of work. It sure beats getting as low as £6.74 an hour for RST as one job on Gumtree was offering and when people say they have a £100 a day job, they forget to divide that by the hours of the shift and the travel expenses etc.

It really depends on how much you need the work too and what skills and experience you have to offer which dictate the rate you earn. That is the same in all industries. For me earning £20+ an hour would be easy with my experience in electrical engineering but I would expect far less for any Surveillance or CP work because I do not have the same depth of experience to offer. It could be worse after all I spent three years as a sports photographer and it cost me more than I made in the long term but did it because I loved to do it until I really needed to pay the rent!

Sorry I have waffled again but you get my point! As you were

VICTORMACE

I'm a door supervisor, been reading posts for quite a while now regarding the sia. We in Belfast are not regulated by the SIA yet !!! I take offense at being eventually ask to do a door supervisors course and to pay for an SIA license for a job ive been doing for 20 years. It seems to me listening to the members talking on the subject of the SIA that regulation by the SIA has opened the flood gates and allowed every Tom Dick and Harry the chance to have a license for what ever branch of the security field. I personally feel that the current regulation has failed really badly and let down all good security personnel who are excellent in their own field. It has driven down wages because the employers can play of good operators against bad ones for the sake of economics and the bad operators drive down standards by their performance. I will eventually do a CP course but I wouldn't have minded struggling to get into an industry that has high standards rather than an SIA driven industry that by its own regulation has let standards slip.

Nomad

OK look at it this way, certainly when I first started work in electronic engineering there was no licence or standard. Anyone whether skilled or not with enough BS could get work and often these cowboys did poor or even unsafe work to which there was nothing anyone could do except maybe fire that person. All that meant was that they could blag there way into another job with little problem. It certainly is not so easy now because of the checks that take place and the penalties for malpractice. This made employers think twice regarding suitability and at least the licence standard was a basic minimum which made it easier for employers to verify that a person had at least attained some standard which is the minimum required.

As for the licence pushing wages and standards down , that has little to do with the standards and more to do with the employers. After all as an employer you have a choice who you hire and if you want to settle for a less than adequate person and pay them peanuts then that is what you will do. Without a standard (no matter how poorly implemented) it means that you could hire the local milkman with no training and experience to do that job if you so wished. I am sure that probably did happen too in some instances (not necessarily a milkman though!). If employers want to settle for second best because it is the cheap option they only have themselves to blame and has nothing to do with the sia as we all know there is a saturated market so there is rich pickings if you want quality. Certainly I have heard of stories of people that have blagged their way into CP jobs and even run companies in the past. Some of those stories being posted on www.arrse.co.uk but now it would be a little harder to get away with especially if you have a criminal background. This can only be a good thing.

I had no issue in having to get a licence for the work I was doing regardless of my experience (which was far in surpass of the minimum standard) because I saw it as proof of what I was capable of as opposed to at that time based solely on references as there was no trade certificate available in my sector of the industry.

No system is perfect so you have to work with the system to your best advantage and while I don't like what it is at present I will work to it's framework. It is about time though that the sia closes the loop hole on consultants not requiring licencing as it has been proved that the undesirable element of the industry just moved up the ladder to avoid being detected or removed by what system is in place now. If anything this has created a more dangerous situation than before.

It is all subjective and my opinion of what is, this of course may not be shared by others and I accept that.

annie

But on a brighter note, the nice woman in the hairdressing gaff that i frequent did actually tell me recently that the government is actually looking at the idea of licencing hairdressers......yes so we will know who to complain to now when we get a shocking haircut!

ASE

Hi Annie,
Who? not the sia - again! Bugger, there goes quality control for my boufant quiff...please please please dont let it be the SIA.....

Scab

Why do people still blame the sia for wages dropping?! Wages are not set by the SIA, all they did was make a naive promise that wages would raise. Market forces for the last ten years have kept pay stagnant; or negative relative to inflation. With the massive influx of immigrants and poor operators willing to work for less this has not helped but then again there was and always will be someone willing to work for less.

This is a big proportion of why no one takes the industries complaints seriously; it looks like we don't know what we're talking about!