“Executive Protection is an art; Executive Protection agents are the artists” — Security Pro.
Learn about the necessary skills to look out for in a good Executive Protection agent you’d like to hire. You can learn about these relevant skills here if you’re looking to upskill as an Executive Protection agent too.
As much as ensuring our safety and security is our daily responsibility, there’s only so much we can do, given the various other to-dos we face. This is why people with the requisite financial capacity hire Executive Protection services.
Let’s explain this further: if you’re a high net-worth individual, you’ll have your hands in different pies, with little to no time to worry about how cautious you are at conducting your business or living your life compared to the average individual. The reason for this caution is that given your status as a high net-worth individual, you’re at a higher risk every day to dangers or harmful acts the average individual may not be. This is what pushes high net-worth individuals to seek professional assistance ensuring their security from time to time — in other words, Executive Protection.
What is Executive Protection?
When you think about Executive Protection, you think of an arrangement where specialized Executive Protection agents execute advanced risk mitigation and damage prevention mechanisms to protect high net-worth individuals who may be vulnerable to security risks and threats due to their eminent status.
Now to the nitty-gritty, if you’re a high net-worth individual looking to employ an Executive Protection agent or an agent looking to upskill to separate yourself from the bunch, here are ten essential skills you need to be on the lookout for:
Communication Skills
This swings both ways – listening and speaking. To be an excellent Executive protection agent, you must be very attentive and have listening skills, as you’ll have to take instructions from your client regularly.
On the other end of the spectrum, speaking skills are also necessary. While it seems conventional or expected, the truth is that communicating with your client may be more complicated than it looks at various times, for instance, when your client isn’t privy to specific strategies you’re executing for their safety. In such an instance, it’s your job to communicate that strategy to your client’s understanding, which will be difficult for you to do if you lack good communication skills.
Resourcefulness
The ability to think outside the box is a requirement you can’t avoid as a good Executive Protection agent. It’s a skill you’ll need because creative thinking helps you see the approach to take in protecting your client from different perspectives you may not have considered if you opted for conventional protection methods.
An Executive Protection agent will encounter challenges and hitches constantly in trying to protect their client. The only way you’ll be able to handle these challenges effectively is if you’re resourceful — able to use all available resources to counter whatever challenges you face that you may not have prepared for.
Defensive Skills
An Executive Protection agent’s core job is to defend and protect their client from all forms of harm. The types of threats and extent of the potential damage that a client may experience will depend primarily on who the client is, what they do, and what kind of people they associate with. For instance, if your client’s a celebrity, you may only need to prepare to deal with stalkers, but if they’re controversial public figures or politicians, you may need to prepare for a more drastic set of risks.
A good Executive Protection agent must also possess wits and brawn, especially for physical defense, so it’s only suitable for an agent to have combat drill experience.
Top-notch surveillance ability
An Executive Protection agent must be able to initiate a birds-eye view to protect their client, the client’s family members, and physical assets in the client’s home at all times. It’s impossible to accomplish this goal with just a pair of eyes, so agents should be skilled in handling surveillance equipment.
It is usually recommended that agents implement CCTV surveillance alongside perimeter surveillance. This measure mitigates security risks by keeping potential attackers at bay since camera surveillance usually imprints the fear of being caught in their minds.
Defensive Driving
Defensive driving is also known as evasive driving and refers to the art of driving while anticipating dangerous situations resulting from the acts of others.
As an Executive Protection agent, it’s essential to know the rudiments of driving. There could be moments when your client would be in increased danger or harm’s way while in transit, needing to be transported off the scene. In such an instance, defensive or evasive driving would come to play in helping you expertly transport your client to a safe place while avoiding attacks or harm, whether targeted at your client or not.
Knowledge of Firearms Usage
The job of an Executive protection agent is to prevent harm from coming to their client, as sometimes, risks of injury may be unavoidable to their client. For this reason, an Executive Protection agent must possess remarkable shooting skills, mainly against criminals looking to cause grievous bodily harm to their client.
Knowing how to use firearms is not only about shooting bullets though, and this is where discretion comes in as an essential skill. As an Executive Protection agent, you must know when to pull the trigger and how to direct your pull so innocent bystanders aren’t hurt or someone looking to hurt your client (not grievously) doesn’t receive the ultimate punishment in the first instance.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality is a subtle skill that an Executive Protection agent must have because some information will be released by your client in confidence while working with you. Your failure to stay discrete with such information may prove disadvantageous to your client’s safety and cause them harm, meaning you would have also failed at your primary job, which is keeping them from harm in the first place.
Information like who your client is, what they do, who their family members are, their location, and their travel routes, among others, must be kept confidential at all times, no matter what.
Cybersecurity expertise
As much as Executive Protection is physical, it’s digital, given our internet age. Clients – mostly Celebrities – often fall prey to cloud service compromises from hackers, which leads to them losing their sensitive information that usually gets sold to the highest bidder. Other times, clients who are business executives could also lose their sensitive data to these hackers looking to ruin them not physically but financially.
Because of these advancements in cybercrimes, it’s expected that Executive Protection agents are skilled in handling cybersecurity for their clients because, most times, a client’s sensitive data can be tied to their life, and if the wrong hands get it, the client would be in a lot of trouble.
Writing Skills
This is a subset of Communication. Writing is central to Executive protection because, as an Executive Protection agent, you will be required to write security reports for your client and document events regularly. You’ll only be able to accomplish these tasks if you’re good at writing in a manner your client can easily understand.
Emergency Medical Skills
This additional skill is crucial because, as mentioned earlier, the one job of an Executive Protection agent is keeping their clients safe from harm; but sometimes, due to no fault of the agent’s, a client may suffer actual injury, and in that instance, the thin line between life and death for the client could rest on them being offered emergency medical attention before medical experts arrive at the scene.
So a good agent must be skilled in offering these emergency medical services like administering CPR, stopping a bleeding, and treating burns, among others.
These are some skills an Executive Protection agent cannot do without. If you’re a high net-worth individual looking for an Executive Protection agent for hire, we’re here to assist you with that at Security Pro.
Here, we do the job of researching, identifying, and connecting you with experts in the field of Executive Protection who have proven skillsets, including the skills mentioned beforehand, that can handle your protective needs adequately.
To start the process, you can easily schedule a brief and free consultation with us or contact us whenever you’re ready; we’ll be on ground to attend to your needs.