Welcome to the Museum Training Resources Training Administrator’s blog. The purpose of this blog is to provide a means of informing those responsible for using our training products as the core of their training program, of changes to our training programs necessitated by current events and changing threats, and to provide a means of passing along other information that we feel will be useful to you in your training efforts. I plan to post something quite frequently but I won’t be the only person posting to the blog. We plan on posting material weekly or more frequently.
While this is a training blog for people who are responsible for administering a training program, and we expect that our blog topics will center around meeting the needs of these folks, we plan to provide materials from several perspectives. As many of you know, I was Director of Security for a major museum, and for the past 39 years I owned and operated the leading security consulting company in the US specifically for cultural properties. I have just under 1000 cultural property clients worldwide. My experience has been that many of you may need information that you can use to constantly justify the existence of your training program or to expand your funding to improve it.
A lifetime in Security
When I began my museum security career in Chicago in 1979, there was no real training given to security personnel. It was a hard sell to fund a program that included hiring a full-time trainer, and it took me several years to get my program up and running. Every year I had to justify keeping it, and the museum director didn’t quite understand that training topics are constantly changing and evolving as the threats change and that requires time and resources. I developed a newsletter that I sent around to key museum staff that included the curators, registrar, and other department heads that listed the security threats and reported incidents from around the world: “A Monet was stolen in Paris”. “A collection was damaged in the UK”. “There was a museum fire California”. My goal was to make the museum’s entire professional staff aware that our world is full of risks and we need to be able to deal with them. In this blog I hope to help you develop a truly comprehensive training program built around our programs and help you understand why we wrote our programs as we did so you can get full benefit from them. Your training program should be visible and in front of your museum’s management so they feel comfortable with its quality and comprehensive curriculum.
The threat we face is changing daily and that is not an exaggeration. I could use artificial intelligence to rob your institution. In fact, I could rob you in several ways and you wouldn’t know what hit you. But well-trained and properly supervised museum security officers could stop me. Just a few years ago, all we needed in our galleries were a few uniformed officers to function as a visible deterrent. Those days are over and if we don’t rise to meet the challenge, so will our careers be over.
I am of the age and place in life where I could retire, move to a tropical island, and enjoy life. I have achieved much in my career. The one thing I and my colleagues have failed at until now is providing a comprehensive, high quality, low-cost security officer training program specific to museums that can be delivered with minimal time investment for the director of security and his or her managers. I made a commitment to join my partners at Museum Training Resources, Inc. to develop such a program because I have very serious fears that we are unable to meet the challenges we face today. I am especially concerned about the role of artificial intelligence in the hands of criminals. When we wrote MuseumDefender™ , our goal was to teach your security officers to think for themselves and be constantly aware of the threats they face.
On The Job Training
OJT is no longer an option. There is a place for OJT in your training program. Security Officers need to learn your building and we can’t teach that in an online program. But OJT is no longer adequate to meet the threats of today and tomorrow. And if you think that having an untrained senior officer pass on his or her bad habits to the new guy is training, then you were wrong.
I have devoted the past two years to helping build this company. I have set prices for our training program so that even the smallest museum can afford it. We built in thirty modules when we discovered that fifteen wouldn’t meet our goals and objectives. Now it is up to you to take the few days required to use our programs as the core of your training and fill in the blanks with the resources we offer you free in this blog. I will not retire until our program becomes the standard for our museum industry and has been adopted by a thousand museums. You should be proud that you are an early adopter whose training programs are head and shoulders above the rest. And I am proud that Museum Training Resources, Inc. has built a means for your program’s success.
Our goal is to help you develop a training program where your security officers are qualified to meet this new challenge and that is the major difference between our program and others. Our goal is to teach your security officers and supervisor to think. Come back here often, at least once a week, for new material. Watch your email for occasional alerts should we find it necessary to make changes or updates to our computer-based training programs due to changing threats. But know that you can meet these challenges. We’ve got your back.
This Blog is our public blog intended for customers of Museum Training Resources, Inc. and non-customers alike. We hope you all can benefit from it. We have a blog with premium content elsewhere on our website that is intended just for our customers, those who use our online training programs. That blog can be reached by signing in using your account information as an administrator of training for your institution. That blog is an exclusive benefit to our valued customers.
Steve Keller
