G4S trains central station employees, others for 'remote guarding'

BOSTON—Jerry Cordasco, G4S monitoring and data center VP of operations, says the company's new high-level training course, which results in G4S Remote Guarding Certification, elevates its operators to the level of highly-trained remote guards and differentiates the advanced video monitoring company from others in the space.

“If what we're doing is really remote guarding, then we're doing what a guard would do if he were physically there. If you're going to do that, you need to think and act like a guard,” Cordasco said. “To my knowledge no one else is doing this kind of training � This is well over 20 hours for every individual operator, plus myself, our operations manager and every member of our sales team. We want everyone to walk the talk, so to speak.”

G4S is a CSAA Five Diamond central station, a fact that assures G4S' operators are already vetted to high industry standards for monitoring of alarms. Isn't that enough? Not according to Cordasco, who asserts the training program fills a gap.

“There is really nothing in the CSAA training that is applicable to the world of remote guarding,” Cordasco said. “You look at the call list and then you go down the call list and you do what you're supposed to do. And fire alarms always dispatch the fire department first and call the homeowner second. It's all about fire alarms and burglar alarms—stuff related to conventional intrusion.”

The completion of the program provides G4S operators the knowledge and skill to communicate and interact effectively and professionally with on-site guard forces or law enforcement, Cordasco said. The training enables G4S to leverage the concept of technology and manned guarding by taking technically skilled personnel and giving them manned guarding skill sets like security interviewing techniques, techniques of effective patrol, ethics in security, and conflict management.

The new operator training course grew out of the training G4S Secure Solutions (formerly Wackenhut) had designed for its worldwide security officer force.

“They have extensive training for their guard force and we leveraged that. We went through their whole course list and picked those things that we felt were most applicable for remote guarding,” Cordasco said. “We turned that into our own program. We didn't design anything brand new, but there's nothing else out there in the general marketplace, so we were fortunate to have within our organization a guard company that had this training. That's one of the strategic advantages we have over almost everyone else doing this—we have both a monitoring center and a guard company.”