The role of a Door Supervisor is, put simply, to provide a comfortable, pleasant and safe atmosphere for anyone using the premises on which he or she works. The Door Supervisor is the first, and in many cases the only, member of a security team that a customer will encounter and, as such, their job is to deter people who may pose a problem once on the premises from entering in the first place – but to do so in such a way as to not put off genuine customers who are just looking to enjoy their evening. This role is important in terms of protecting customer relations.

Much of a Door Supervisor’s role is quite straightforward – in the first instance it is about ensuring that venue policy and the law on admissions are upheld. This entails turning away people who fail to meet dress requirements or the venue’s minimum age. For those customers who meet requirements for entry, the door supervisor should greet them politely on their arrival and wish them a good evening on their departure. They also need to see that fire safety requirements, such as maximum occupancy and emergency exits, are stuck to.

As not all troublemakers are immediately apparent prior to entry, a door supervisor must also see to it that should trouble flare up inside the venue, the person or persons responsible are identified and dealt with in the correct manner using only reasonable force, and that any incidents that take place are documented as soon as they are satisfactorily dealt with. Company drugs policy and the standard drinking up period are also within the Door Supervisor’s remit, and they must ensure that at the end of the evening all customers leave the premises in an orderly fashion, checking the toilets afterwards to ensure that no-one has been left behind.

The Door Supervisor’s role, in short, is to see that order is maintained on the premises on which they work, and the relevant SIA qualifications are designed to see to it that any candidate for the role of Door Supervisor is fully conversant with the way in which this role is upheld. To this end, the course for an SIA-accredited Door Supervisor deals with a range of subjects that enable the individual seeking accreditation to perform the role to its optimum level. This range of subjects is more extensive than one may assume when they first think about the job of Door Supervision.

The course extends to thirty classroom hours and two hours of exams. The 30 hours of classroom work are split into two halves of fourteen hours, the first half being entitled “Role and Responsibilities of Door Supervisors in the Security Industry Environment”. This half covers all the hypothetical considerations of someone wishing to work as a Door Supervisor. Beginning with an introduction to their chosen role, and to the leisure and security industries in which they will make their living, this section of the course also entails ten further modules, all of which combine to give a full understanding of the legal requirements, responsibilities and entitlements of a Door Supervisor. These are as follows