Guns or an EMT? Which is a better certification for Executive Protection?
When you look at executive protection agents and bodyguards in movies, you typically notice that they have or use a gun. However, what many people don’t know is that a gun is rarely used by agents. What’s more important are the soft skills, more specifically, an EMT certification. In this article, we’ll discuss the difference between hard and soft skills and why an EMT certification is better for an executive protection agent.
At WPG, we believe that when it comes to the protection of our clients, it’s not about being able to use a gun; the skills that we use every day and the skills that often save lives are the soft skills.
What Are Hard Skills?
By hard skills, we, of course, mean our ability to fight and use guns and other weapons. While these skills are necessary for any executive protection agent, the need rarely comes up when we are working with clients. Being able to use a gun and use it properly is a requirement of any executive protection agent; however, because should the need come up, we need to be prepared.
What Are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are our ability to understand our clients and fit ourselves into their lifestyle without disrupting it. We believe in something called “The Gold Standard” when it comes to delivering customer service. This includes our pre-planning, learning about the client, learning about their customs and routine, and of course, our life-saving EMT skills.
Gold Standard Executive Protection
Let’s talk a little more about the “Gold Standard.” More often than not, executive protection isn’t about who has the best skills with a weapon or the largest gun. It’s not about the size of an agent or their ability to fight, despite common misconceptions. In the movies, you’ll see executive protection agents use their hard skills more often than their soft skills. This depiction is absolutely incorrect. We rarely use our martial arts or weapons skills.
The key to executive protection is the pre-planning. If you have to use those hard skills, you already failed your client because you’ve put them in harm’s way. We want to avoid doing this. Through the right execution, we’ll never find a need to use physical force to protect a client.
What we do use every single day in our line of work is our customer service skills. We blend into our clients’ lives and surroundings. The protection of our clients is about being proactive, which is why pre-planning is so important. Many bodyguards fail for this reason; they simply don’t have the experience for the proper planning and execution.
With the right advances done and the right intelligence under our belts, agents know exactly how to prevent the client from coming into contact with any dangerous situations.
With advances done and the right intelligence, agents know where they’re headed so that they can avoid these potentially dangerous situations and ensure the safety of the client.
Are Guns Necessary?
While having the right skills when it comes to firearms and other weapons is necessary for a protection agent, they are not typically useful. This is because your executive protection agents have already done the work beforehand necessary for keeping clients safe.
Having these skills is necessary to a point. However, soft skills are used every single day.
Are EMT Skills Necessary?
Emergency Medical Training (EMT) skills are an absolute necessity when it comes to executive protection. As we have mentioned, guns should never need to be used if the agent has done their job effectively. However, you can’t prevent a health emergency from occurring. These skills are the difference between life and death. For example, if a client has a history of heart problems, these skills could literally save a life. Whether or not a client has a history of health issues, these skills can save the life of any client.
Protection isn’t just about ensuring the safety of the client from a dangerous entity; it should involve having the necessary skills to deal with any situation, especially those that are life-threatening.
Executive Protection With Emphasis on Soft Skills
Throw away your misconceptions about executive protection agents and their duties. The movies and television shows put an emphasis on the skills that are hardly ever used, like fighting and weaponry. They do this to add drama. However, it’s complete fiction. Instead, we anticipate a client’s needs.
Soft skills go beyond knowing how to interact with our clients. EMT training is necessary for every executive protection agent. Not only that, during the pre-planning stage of our process, we map the nearest hospitals. If a client has a certain health condition, we make sure to find a specialist in the area and send the client’s medical records to the hospital ahead of time. This ensures that we’ve done everything we can to save a life.
