In the “before times” (BC, or before COVID-19), I had for a number of years been keen to write an article on the security industry’s challenge of finding and keeping good employees. In all my years of writing articles and over hundreds of interviews this was the single most common pain point I heard from manufacturers, dealers and integrators alike, often unsolicited. I finally got my chance to write a cover story about this topic and I was excited for it to come out in print — which it did, in March 2020.
While it was, if I do say so myself, a very thorough look at the issues the industry was facing at the time, I’m not sure the article got a lot of play, given the urgent matter of COVID-19 shutting down offices almost immediately after the issue posted online (and who knows where the print editions ended up that month!). For a time at the beginning of the pandemic crisis, workforce shortages were the last thing on people’s minds. It was more a question of how to keep current employees working.