Key Points

• Security officers deliver far greater social value than the occupational prestige they are afforded, a gap confirmed by new UK research and echoed in international data.
• This misalignment has real consequences — from low pay and limited career pathways to chronic recruitment and retention challenges — despite the profession’s essential role and its below average vulnerability to AI displacement.
• Policy and procurement choices can close the gap, by rewarding quality over lowest cost, investing in training and career development, and elevating public understanding of the profession’s importance.

It’s no surprise that some jobs that provide substantial social value go unappreciated — as the inverse is striking. Too many people make too much money doing socially meaningless work to imagine a straight line between a job’s social value and how much you can get from doing it. (Near-daily news articles reflect the disconnect, like “Lil Tay, Bella Thorne and More Stars Who’ve Claimed to Earn $1M on 1st Day of OnlyFans.”)

A new UK study measures this gap across the labor market. It proves that an occupation’s social value and its prestige are often distinct — and that security officers are one of the primary victims. Findings show that the public’s sense of social value of frontline security work outstrips the profession’s measured prestige, an insight that strengthens the case for better pay, training, and recognition. Moreover, it’s becoming increasingly clear that security work is resilient to wholesale AI replacement, a strong argument for why investment in people matters now.

Study & Key Findings

Occupational prestige refers to the collective esteem or respect that society accords to a particular job or profession. It is a measure of social standing, often shaped by perceptions of education, income, authority, and influence associated with the role. In contrast, occupational social value captures the perceived importance or benefit that an occupation provides to society at large. Prestige is about status and desirability; social value is about contribution and necessity.

In the study, researchers conducted a comprehensive survey of 2,429 UK respondents, asking them to rate 576 occupation titles on two separate scales, one for each (“Occupational prestige and occupational social value in the United Kingdom: New indices for the modern British economy,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, June 2024).

The authors show that prestige and social value are correlated but distinct.  Some jobs, such as doctors and engineers, score highly on both measures. But others, including security officers, exhibit a pronounced gap: their social value is recognized as substantial, but their prestige lags behind.

Security Officers: Prestige vs. Social Value

For security officers ("Security Guards" in the job classification), the mismatch is striking: the social value of their work — protecting people, enabling commerce, and maintaining public order — registers higher than the occupational prestige assigned to the role. That gap helps explain why communities rely on private security officers even as procurement markets treat them as low status and low-paid.

Security officers received a mean occupational prestige score of 39.61 — well below the overall average of 45.87 for all occupations. However, their mean occupational social value score was 53.68, significantly above the average of 48.88. The difference of -14.06 points is among the largest negative gaps in the entire data set, indicating that the public sees security officers as much more socially valuable than prestigious.

This pattern places security officers in what the study terms "Quadrant 2": occupations with low prestige but high social value, like childcare workers, home and health aides, hospital admissions personnel, and other jobs that are essential to societal functioning but are often overlooked or undervalued in terms of status and reward.

Occupations that are in Quadrant 2 often struggle with recruitment and self-identity could be promoted and elevated by stressing their perceived importance to society.

It’s not just a UK thing. A comprehensive study in 2022 in the US ranked the prestige of more than 1,000 specific occupations and “security guard” came in was near the bottom, around 800, just above a painter and below a billing clerk. (See Occupational Prestige Ratings, 2022.)

The implication is plain: the work of security officers is recognized as important and necessary, but this recognition does not translate into social status, pay, or career advancement — a misalignment that has profound implications for recruitment, retention, and the overall health of the security profession.

It’s a clear call to action, and one that society can’t afford to wait for technology to solve or render moot. The frequent counterargument — that technology will make human officers redundant — does not reflect reality. AI and automation are proving to be powerful tools for surveillance, analytics, and efficiency, but they do not replace the human judgment, de-escalation skills, and situational adaptability that officers provide. Industry leaders note that AI tends to eliminate inefficiency rather than replace skilled personnel, and that the near-term future is one of human machine collaboration rather than substitution.

Security officers and general security “guards’ have a slightly below average risk of AI displacement, according to a study of 5,173 jobs analyzed by displacement.ai. Indeed, the work of security officers fits squarely into the three categories of labor that technology can’t replicate, as outlined by Kevin Roose, New York Times technology writer and author of Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation.

• Surprising work. Work that involves complex rules, changing environments, and unexpected variables. (Machines are great at chess, but make terrible Kindergarten teachers, for example.)
• Scarce work. Work that involves high-stakes situations, and jobs that society would find unacceptable to automate, such emergency call operators. (Even if machines could, people want humans to help us to deal with problems — not a bot.)
• Social jobs. Jobs that involve making people 'feel things' rather than making things, like work in social services and health care, therapists, and others whose jobs involve an emotional component, like flight attendants.

AI can flag anomalies and streamline reporting, but only humans can interpret intent, exercise discretion, and build the trust necessary for effective security operations. This resilience to automation strengthens the case for investing in people doing security work — because these roles are likely to remain essential.

Key Considerations for Decisionmakers

Procurement systems and public policy shape the incentives that determine pay, training, and career pathways for frontline officers. When award criteria prioritize lowest cost, or when job classifications and pay bands treat guarding as interchangeable labor, the result is a workforce that is under resourced relative to its social contribution. The core conclusion — that social value outpaces prestige in security work— adds weight to the argument that policy choices, not inherent occupational limits, determine whether security work is properly valued.

Policy choices, not inherent occupational limits, determine whether security work is properly valued.

On a positive note, if social value outstrips prestige, then policymakers and buyers have room to act. Enforcing reasonable minimum requirements, embedding multi-criteria procurement that rewards quality, and funding career pathways can align occupational prestige of security work more closely with social value, resulting in better outcomes for both communities and employers. Because the evidence shows that the public values security work, policymakers should work to close the gap.

More information. The Ligue’s Global Security Barometer provides additional details on how negative stereotypes, limited public awareness, lack of public investment, and media portrayals exacerbate the value-prestige gap and provides a roadmap for the many actions on many fronts that are needed to bridge it.

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