Pros
You work fairly closely with local law enforcement, so if you are trying to get a job in policing, this may be a good stepping stone. Most of the colleagues, security and medical staff included, are good people to work with. Each security team seem to care about the safety of each other, other colleagues, and patients and visitors. Opportunities for overtime if you so choose.
Cons
Management seems to add something to our job every shift we work. Sometimes the change is small and meaningless, sometimes they seem to disrupt how the job was performed entirely. Many times, they contradict previous changes. The organization does not consider education or job performance in pay, only prior work history. Meaning, if you are younger, you will almost always make less money than someone older, simply because you have less work experience than them. Management likes to say this is because "they can't hire someone with 15 years of experience at a lower rate." What they fail to realize is this is an entry level job, and anyone can do the job proficiently, no matter their work experience. And if they were to actually look at job performance, they would realize that those with less experience actually outperform those with loads of relevant prior experience. If you do want to reach out to management about feeling as if you are inadequately paid, the director will tell you, despite officer compensation coming directly from his budget, he has nothing to do with pay and HR determines everything. This also means that anyone doing a compensation review, or a performance review knows nothing about your work ethic and is basing everything off of a resume. They used to do merit-based wage increases but have not done these for the past two years, so there is no incentive to increase productivity, and this has shown to be making everyone less enthusiastic about their job. We are required to attend mandatory training on our off days every quarter, and they have just added two additional days that we must either come in early or come in on a day off to train. You are not given any sick time, only PTO, which is accrued at a dismal rate. With less than 1 year, the max that can be accrued is 5.5 hours per pay period. Because we work 12-hour shifts, this means you would have to work 6 weeks before having enough PTO to take a single shift off. The max then jumps from 5.5 to 6.4 after 1 year but you are stuck there until year 5, so buckle up. Pretty much no opportunities to advance. Only one Sgt. position has opened since they restructured a few years ago and will most likely be the last one until one of the Sgt's or Lt's retires as none of them seem to have any desire to leave.