In pre-Covid times, during his 30 years as a risk management academic, Dr Kevin Kane would put up a slide in a lecture to students of a list of risks, that would include war, terrorism and pandemic. “I didn’t actually think that two of them would hit Manchester so hard,” he told Professional Security this afternoon.
The occasion for our phone call was the postgraduate certificate in security and risk management, new from the University of Salford; run with the consultancy Security Exchange. The course begins in September. It’s by ‘distance learning’, to use the education jargon, a phrase that dates from before the world became used to such a thing as social distancing. As a course taught entirely online, unlike the traditional campus-based course, it won’t be affected by the restrictions on gatherings and keeping a distance, which – as featured in the July 2020 print issue of Professional Security magazine – is what campus security departments have to work out before the start of the 2021-22 academic year.
Security is, as Dr Kane said at the start of our conversation, a sub-set of risk. Of the pandemic, he recalls that as a risk it was always there, and he would speak of the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918 in lectures. “I think people are becoming more and more aware of risk,” such as climate change risk, he says. And as he adds, they’re risks that in the mass we don’t manage very well, barring some areas of excellence (to leave him for a moment, all the more reason to study; what is it that sets apart those that plan and respond to risks well?).
Given that he said that the average business does not manage risk very well – until it hits, and they suddenly realise ‘oops’, we asked why that is? He replied that those in the field of security and risk know that things can easily happen; most people, though, have an ‘optimism bias’, no matter how miserable they might otherwise be. People think that things won’t happen to them; to prepare for a risk that might happen, requires paying out money today – that’s real; ‘but the risk is tomorrow …. I think that’s it; risk’s potential; they are in the future, they might not happen’.
He goes from there to the very crux of a dilemma facing all security management; how do you measure, let alone put a value, on prevention of crime or any other risk? If nothing happens, how to prove that the organisation has avoided risk, and has hired a good security or risk professional? As in the talk this year of a ‘skills gap’, as aired at the SIA skills summit in March, so much is connected – without being able to demonstrate that work is done well, how can a security manager expect to be well paid and respected, and indeed regarded as a professional at all.
For Dr Kane, that is the whole idea of offering qualifications, credentials to people, so that hirers know that the person they are recruiting has gone through formal training.
To turn, then, to the content of the course; it’s split, broadly speaking, between theory and practice. As Dr Kane sees it, both sides benefit; the practitioner by thinking about why they do something, and doing good practice that has theory behind it (to leave him a moment, not a hunch or back of the envelope formula, or merely because ‘that’s the way things have always been done around here’). The academic on the theory side benefits by seeing what theories are like in the real world.
We asked about the online delivery of the course; due to the Covid-19 pandemic, campuses have largely gone over to online delivery. In any case, the software has come in in recent years, from the days when to hook up for a remote conference required a technician. What was once the stuff of NASA is now common, and student feedback is positive, Dr Kane says.
Likewise the certificate course will offer interviews with people in the industry, question and answer sessions, and case studies, besides the electronic library of textbooks, the ‘new normal’ for university students even before Covid-19.
The course has two modules; first, exploring security and risk, such as the various models of security and risk management; second, security and practice, such as product recall (whether because of deliberate or accidental contamination), kidnap, and cyber-security. Dr Kane did make the point that the course lays down a basis of ultimately, if you can and want to, going on to a master’s degree.
Who can apply? People who already have a degree or some formal qualification; or, it may be that you do not have any university background, but have industry experience and can benefit from such a course. Dr Kane of Salford Business School is programme leader for the course, to give him his exact title; he specialises in project management risk.
