Time Machine

Security supervisors

Name: First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers: employment and wages since 1955
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers (SOC 33-1091)

Also called Security manager, Security operations supervisor, Guard supervisor, Site security supervisor, Physical security supervisor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 81,480 US security supervisors, with median pay of $55,940 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 15,000 from 1955, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for security supervisors: IP camera networks and mobile guard tour apps, 2015 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3.7% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

26.2% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Security supervisors: jobs and pay since 1955 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/33-1091

Chicago

Future History. "Security supervisors: jobs and pay since 1955." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/33-1091.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_33_1091, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Security supervisors: jobs and pay since 1955}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/33-1091}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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1850187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Detective Superintendent / Guard Captain (Pinkerton and agency era)

Known then as Chief of Plant Guards / Head Watchman (industrial plant era)

Known then as Security Supervisor / Plant Protection Supervisor (WWII and Cold War industrial era)

Known then as Security Supervisor / Shift Supervisor (contract guard industry formation)

Known then as Security Operations Supervisor / Site Supervisor (professionalization era)

Known then as First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers (BLS SOC 33-1091)

Known today as First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers (BLS SOC 33-1091)

Projected to still be called First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers (BLS SOC 33-1091)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

81K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$55,940

Est.

≈ $54,506 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1850

Allan Pinkerton establishes the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago, marking the origin of organized private security with a supervisory structure in the United States. By 1855 Pinkerton has contracted with six midwestern railroads to provide detective and guard services, requiring a formal chain of command: agents, operatives, and the superintendents who coordinated them. The Pinkerton model would define the organizational template for private security supervision for the next century.

Beat · 1909

William J. Burns organizes the William J. Burns National Detective Agency, and within a year convinces the American Bankers Association to shift its contract from Pinkerton to Burns. This creates a second major private security organization with its own supervisory hierarchy, establishing competitive pressure on Pinkerton to improve its operational standards. The "Big Three" era of Pinkerton, Burns, and (after 1954) Wackenhut would come to define the structure of the American private security industry through the late 20th century.

Beat · 1915

California becomes the first state to regulate private security, placing licensing and regulation of private security guards under the State Board of Prison Directors. State-level regulatory frameworks for security officers and their supervisors would spread nationally over the following decades, eventually establishing licensing requirements in all 50 states. Supervisors bore direct liability for ensuring their teams were properly licensed and certified.

Beat · 1940

The onset of World War II triggers a major expansion of industrial plant security across the United States. Defense contractors protecting war production facilities employ large, formally organized guard forces with clear supervisory hierarchies, background checks, and documented post procedures. Executive Order 8972 (December 1941) establishes the Army-Navy Munitions Board plant protection standards, effectively professionalizing industrial security supervision at federal contractors and laying the groundwork for post-war private security management practices.

Beat · 1954

George Wackenhut, a former FBI special agent, founds Special Agent Investigators, Inc. in Miami with three former FBI colleagues. Within five years the company is posting revenues over $1 million and employing more than 1,300 people. Wackenhut's FBI background shapes the company's supervisory culture: structured reporting chains, documented procedures, and a strong emphasis on the professionalism of the supervisory layer. By 1961 Wackenhut declares itself the fourth largest security company in the nation.

Beat · 1977

ASIS International, founded in 1955 as the professional association for security management, introduces the Certified Protection Professional (CPP) credential. The CPP requires at least five years of security management experience and demonstrated competency across eight knowledge domains including physical security, personnel security, investigations, and emergency planning. The CPP becomes the "gold standard" recognition for security supervisors and managers, and it shifts the professional identity of the security supervisor from a semi-skilled foreman to a credentialed manager comparable to a PMP in project management.

Beat · 1985

The Hallcrest Report, commissioned by the National Institute of Justice, becomes the first comprehensive study of private security employment in the United States. The report finds that private security employment reached 1.1 to 1.25 million by 1982, making private security larger than public law enforcement for the first time. The report also documents significant problems: low wages, minimal training, high turnover among guard-level staff, and an absence of national standards. These findings catalyze reform efforts and increase pressure on supervisors to manage a workforce with structural quality challenges.

Beat · 2001

The September 11 attacks reshape the security industry fundamentally. Within months, airport security is federalized under the new Transportation Security Administration, corporate security budgets rise sharply across the private sector, and security directors are invited into executive-level strategic conversations for the first time at many organizations. The attacks also create demand for new supervisory skills: threat assessment, intelligence sharing with law enforcement (via the NYPD Shield and similar programs), and crisis response management. First-line security supervisors in high-risk venues face expanded job requirements almost overnight.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1850

When Allan Pinkerton established the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago in 1850, he was not simply creating a detective service: he was building an organizational structure with agents, operatives, and the people who coordinated them. By February 1855, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, Pinkerton had formalized this structure into a contract security apparatus whose daily operations required someone to assign patrol routes, check that agents were at their posts, review reports, and relay orders. That person, whether called a superintendent, a captain, or simply a senior detective, was the functional ancestor of today's security supervisor. The railroads had a specific problem: cargo theft and passenger robbery on routes stretching hundreds of miles, with no public police force capable of patrolling them. Pinkerton's solution was a geographically dispersed network of guards supervised by district operatives who in turn reported to the central agency. The supervisory layer was not optional; without it the guards were uncoordinated and unaccountable. As industrial America grew through the latter half of the 19th century, the model scaled: factories, banks, department stores, and eventually federal buildings all employed their own guard forces, each requiring a foreman or supervisor to run shifts, enforce procedures, and report incidents. The role was informal and unnamed for much of this period, embedded inside broader watchman and detective operations. It would not acquire a distinct occupational identity in Census records until the 20th century, but the work itself was clearly present from the moment organized private security existed at scale.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace security supervisors? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

+3.7%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 33-1091 (First-line supervisors of security workers): 82.7 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 85.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +3.0 thousand (+3.7%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

26.2%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 33-1091.00 First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.262, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.143 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.381; GPT-4-rated β 0.405. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for security supervisors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereReview AI-generated executive summaries of officer daily activity reports and incident logs, then approve, correct, or escalate them to clients and upper management.

Review AI-generated executive summaries of officer daily activity reports and incident logs, then approve, correct, or escalate them to clients and upper management.^[5],[8]

Tools picking this up

TrackTik ReportPro AI ↗GuardMetrics AI Refine ↗

Where your edge is

Treat AI summaries as a first draft, not a final product. Add contextual judgment the model cannot provide: officer history, site-specific patterns, and liability framing.

AI is sitting alongside you hereBuild and publish officer shift schedules using AI-assisted scheduling software that accounts for guard certifications, contract compliance requirements, overtime limits, and site-specific post coverage.

Build and publish officer shift schedules using AI-assisted scheduling software that accounts for guard certifications, contract compliance requirements, overtime limits, and site-specific post coverage.^[9],[1]

Tools picking this up

TrackTik ReportPro AI ↗

Where your edge is

Master the constraint rules and exception workflows in scheduling platforms so AI-generated rosters still meet your contractual post-coverage obligations and labor regulations.

AI is sitting alongside you hereAudit access-control logs and AI-generated anomaly reports to identify unauthorized entry attempts, credential-sharing patterns, and tailgating incidents, then brief site management on findings.

Audit access-control logs and AI-generated anomaly reports to identify unauthorized entry attempts, credential-sharing patterns, and tailgating incidents, then brief site management on findings.^[6],[10]

Tools picking this up

Ambient Intelligence ↗Verkada ↗

Where your edge is

Combine access log analysis with physical walk-throughs; AI flags statistical outliers, but understanding which patterns matter for a given site requires your local knowledge.

Where security supervisors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Emergency Management Directors
US median pay
$93,330 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+3.9%
Compliance Officers
US median pay
$80,730 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+3.8%
First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives
US median pay
$106,040 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+3.3%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Emergency Management Directors

Emergency Management Directors oversee all-hazards preparedness and response, drawing heavily on the incident command, stakeholder coordination, and crisis decision-making that security supervisors already practice daily. The gap is the breadth of hazard types, interagency coordination (FEMA, public health, utilities), and the policy and budget authority that comes with the role.

What you'd add

· FEMA Incident Command System (ICS-200 through ICS-400) and NIMS certification
· Multi-agency coordination and public-sector budget management
· Hazard-mitigation planning and after-action report writing
· Emergency Alert and public communication systems

What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one

Tools of the era

How has the work of security supervisors changed since 1850?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Telegraph and written orders (railroad and industrial guard era)
The first security supervisors coordinated their guards through written post orders, word of mouth, and where available the telegraph. A Pinkerton superintendent in the 1860s issued patrol assignments on paper, received reports at the end of each shift, and communicated urgent matters by wire to the agency's central office. The patrol itself was unverifiable: a guard was expected to walk a beat, but there was no mechanism beyond a random supervisor visit to confirm it. This information asymmetry between the supervisor and the guard was the central operational challenge of the era, and it persisted for the better part of a century.
Two-way radio and telephone check-in (WWII industrial security era)
World War II transformed industrial security: defense plants employed large guard forces under formal supervision chains, and the U.S. government required documented security procedures for facilities holding classified contracts. Two-way radio, which had been a military communications tool, diffused into private security through the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s most large security operations used radio dispatch, allowing supervisors to coordinate multiple posts in real time without physical travel between them. The telephone check-in system, where guards called a supervisor at fixed intervals to confirm their safety and position, became standard practice. These tools reduced the information gap between supervisor and guard but left patrol verification still largely on the honor system.
CCTV and guard tour wand systems (professionalization era)
Closed-circuit television, commercially available in the United States from the late 1960s onward, gave security supervisors their first independent verification tool: a camera feed that did not depend on the guard's self-report. By the 1970s CCTV was standard in banks, government buildings, and large retail operations. Equally significant was the guard tour system: a wand or key that guards swiped at fixed checkpoints along their patrol route, creating a timestamped electronic log the supervisor could review. Companies like Detex Corporation commercialized these systems in the 1960s and 1970s. Together CCTV and tour wands gave supervisors their first objective picture of what their teams were actually doing across a shift. ASIS International, founded in 1955, introduced the Certified Protection Professional (CPP) credential in 1977 as a formal mark of supervisory competence in this more technology-mediated era.
Effect on the work
Guard tour wands reduced the time supervisors spent on random patrol verification visits, shifting supervisory labor toward report review, scheduling, and incident investigation. CCTV monitoring centralized surveillance work and created a new supervisory task: reviewing footage after incidents.
Digital access control and workforce management software
Networked access control systems, replacing physical keyed locks with card-reader databases, created a new information layer that security supervisors owned and managed: who has access to which areas, when they used it, and where anomalies appeared in the log. Simultaneously, dedicated security workforce management software began replacing paper scheduling and handwritten daily activity reports. Platforms from companies like TrackTik (founded 2003) and GuardTek digitized the routine administrative work of the security supervisor: shift rosters, post orders, incident reports, and certification tracking. The 9/11 attacks in 2001 accelerated investment in all of these technologies: federal building security standards were tightened, airport and transit security went through a major structural change with the creation of the TSA, and corporate security budgets rose sharply across the private sector.
IP camera networks and mobile guard tour apps
The shift from analog CCTV to networked IP cameras with cloud storage made high-definition multi-camera surveillance accessible to facilities of all sizes. Security supervisors could review footage from a laptop or phone, monitor live feeds remotely, and retrieve timestamped clips within seconds of an incident rather than rewinding tapes. Mobile apps for guard tour verification replaced physical wand systems: guards used smartphones with GPS and NFC to check in at patrol points, and supervisors received real-time dashboards showing where each officer was at any moment. This closed the last major information gap that had existed since the Pinkerton era: the supervisor could now verify, in real time and after the fact, exactly what their team had done.
AI video analytics and LLM-assisted report generation
AI-powered video analytics platforms, led by Ambient.ai and Verkada among others, now process camera feeds continuously to flag anomalies: loitering, perimeter breaches, tailgating, weapons detection. The security supervisor's role in this era shifts from reviewing hours of footage manually to triaging AI-generated alerts: deciding whether a flagged event requires dispatch, escalation, or closure as a false positive. Simultaneously, LLM-based tools like TrackTik ReportPro AI convert officer field notes into structured incident documentation, and AI scheduling tools optimize shift rosters against certification requirements and contract compliance rules. These tools augment rather than replace the supervisor: the judgment calls, the liability framing, the officer coaching, and the emergency command functions remain deeply human. The 2026 SDM Magazine industry survey found security leaders positioning AI video analytics as a productivity multiplier for supervisors, not a workforce replacement.

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First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers employment and pay by year

On record since1850

Latest US employment81,480 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$55,940 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+3.7% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 9 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1955	15,000	n/a	Est., The Rise and Fall of Wackenhut Security Researched context	Report
1960	n/a	$4,800	Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched context	Report
1982	55,000	n/a	Est., Hallcrest Report I (Cunningham et al… Researched context	Report
1990	75,000	n/a	Est., Hallcrest Report II Researched context	Report
2021	55,450	$50,240	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	59,520	$48,810	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	64,900	$54,580	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	70,310	$58,610	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	81,480	$55,940	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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Where security supervisors go next

Emergency Management Directors

Telegraph and written orders (railroad and industrial guard era)Telegraph1850–1940

Two-way radio and telephone check-in (WWII industrial security era)Two-way radio1940–1975

CCTV and guard tour wand systems (professionalization era)CCTV1970–1995

Digital access control and workforce management softwareDigital access control1995–2010

IP camera networks and mobile guard tour appsIP camera networks2015–2023

AI video analytics and LLM-assisted report generationAI video analytics2023–present

First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers employment and pay by year

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