Executive Protection Standards: What Makes a Standard Credible?

executive protection training standards

Why Independent Security Advisors Has Earned a Place in the Executive Protection Standards Conversation

By Matthew C. Parker
CEO, Independent Security Advisors LLC | Director of Training, EPTraining.us

Independent Security Advisors has been working on measurable executive protection training standards since 2011, years before today’s ASIS, BEPP and ANSI debate. Matthew Parker traces ISA’s early standards work, outside regulatory review, state licensing relationships and continuing argument that professional training must be measurable, testable and relevant to the people who actually perform protective operations.

The executive protection industry is talking about standards again, and I think that is a good thing. What is easy to forget, especially when looking at the profession through the lens of the last year or two, is that standards were not always a popular subject in executive protection. For many years, even discussing national or broadly recognized training standards was viewed with suspicion.

Independent Security Advisors did not start discussing executive protection standards when ASIS published an executive protection standard in 2025 or because BEPP’s privately developed consensus document received an ANSI designation in 2026. Our published record on training standards reaches back to 2011, when we were developing a program to support law-enforcement officers assigned to protect elected officials.

That history matters because it explains why I continue to ask some fairly basic questions whenever somebody tells the profession that they have developed or support a new standard, credential or certification.

• What exactly is the standard and what is it supposed to accomplish? Is it intended to regulate training, operations or establish some other professional requirement?
• Who recognizes it, how is performance measured against it, and how does it interact with existing state regulation? Most importantly, does meeting the standard actually make the person doing the job more capable?

Those are not hostile questions. They are the kinds of questions we should be able to answer.

The Current Standards Debate: ASIS, BEPP and ANSI

The standards environment is unquestionably different today. ASIS International published its Executive Protection Standard in 2025. BEPP developed its own executive protection consensus document, ANSI/BEPP EPS-2026, which received American National Standard approval in 2026.

Those developments deserve examination, but the terminology needs to remain precise. ANSI explains that it is a private nonprofit organization, not part of the federal government, and that it does not itself develop standards. ANSI also makes clear that voluntary consensus standards are not law unless an authority later incorporates them into a binding requirement.

That distinction matters. An American National Standard designation does not mean Congress enacted the document, a federal agency imposed it, the fifty states adopted it, or the executive protection profession collectively accepted it as the nation’s governing standard. The designation tells us something important about the process used to develop the document; it does not answer every other question a practitioner, employer or regulator should ask.

• Does a state recognize it?
• Does it satisfy a licensing requirement?
• Can employers implement it?
• Can training providers teach against it?
• Can practitioners reasonably access it?
• Does it establish individual competence?
• Who tests that competence, and what professional result follows from meeting the standard?

Again, those are not hostile questions. They are the questions standards are supposed to survive, and they are not new questions for ISA. To understand why we are asking them now, we have to go back to 2011.

The Problem We Encountered in 2011

Following the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, what would soon become the ISA team was approached by local law-enforcement agencies seeking close-protection training that would help them support their own elected officials. Our original course was relatively short and covered the fundamentals of physical and event security, advance work, movement and immediate-action procedures.

While developing that course, however, we encountered a larger problem. We could not find a single, readily available, quantifiable training standard specifically designed for state and local law-enforcement personnel performing close-protection duties. There was the National Governors Protective Security Training Program, but assistance in adapting that program to the local training requirement was not available to us, so we kept looking.

That search pushed the design of the initial program beyond the scope of the original course. We examined federal and military training models, reviewed private-sector executive protection practices and conducted the instructional-systems-design work necessary to identify the critical skills a protective agent actually needed to perform. The program became longer and more demanding because the training requirements we identified to actually prepare an officer or agent to provide close protection exceeded our original syllabus.

Looking back, the question driving the effort was practical rather than academic. If we were going to tell an agency that its officers had achieved the training objectives necessary to perform protective duties, then we should be able to tell that agency what standard they had been trained to meet.

Growing Pains: 2012–2014

By 2012, ISA had begun taking the program through outside regulatory and accreditation processes rather than relying exclusively on our own opinion of whether the curriculum was good enough. That year we received the first of what would become several state regulatory approvals and law-enforcement training recognitions. The process was expensive and time-consuming, but its purpose was straightforward and worth the effort.

We believed that if students and employers were going to place value on the training we offered, somebody outside ISA should examine what we were teaching and objectively determine whether it satisfied applicable requirements for students to be licensed, certified or otherwise approved to conduct executive protection.

By 2014, we were publicly pushing the issue further. In announcing an educational partnership that year, we wrote that we hoped it would become “the first step in establishing a recognized national standard in executive protection training and accreditation.” That language is worth remembering because it was written before executive protection standards became a major industry topic.

We were looking for broader professional recognition and measurable training standards at a time when the private sector did not have a single framework we could simply adopt.

The response was not universal applause. Some people in the profession questioned whether the effort represented the beginning of a federal takeover of private executive protection training. We continued anyway, and later that year the International Foundation for Protection Officers endorsed ISA’s dignitary protection training program.

That milestone tied training, education and certification to professional and ethical standards. With the IFPO endorsement also came our first scholarships and reduced-tuition programs because access to professional training was also part of the discussion.

That period still influences how I look at standards today. There was no obvious commercial advantage in being the company talking about them. There was no new executive protection credential to market and no large standards movement to join. We were trying to persuade people that measurable, externally reviewed training standards deserved serious attention.

Curriculum and Standards Were Never the Same Thing

In 2017, I addressed the issue again in Executive Protection Training Programs: New EP Instructors Beware, It’s Not Easy. I wrote that specialized training providers have “two critical core concerns, curriculum development and standards of training.”

I still believe that distinction is fundamental. A curriculum tells us what subjects are going to be taught; a standard tells us what acceptable performance looks like. A school can teach advances, threat assessments and basic operations, but that alone does not tell a student, employer or regulator what level of performance was required for graduation.

The 2017 article made the argument more forcefully than some of our earlier writing. We stressed that programs should establish quantifiable and achievable standards for graduation, and we warned against building those standards around war stories or an instructor’s personal recollection of how something was done on a particular deployment.

Experience matters, but experience is not a substitute for instructional design. The instructor’s job is to convert relevant experience, doctrine and research on current operational requirements into training that a student can learn, practice and demonstrate.

By 2018, We Were Still Asking Why This Had Not Been Solved

Our November 2018 article, Executive Protection Training Standards: A National Priority?, revisited the history beginning in 2011.

It documented the original law-enforcement request, the search for external training models, the state regulatory work, the 2014 effort to gain broader educational recognition and the industry’s mixed reaction to standardization. By then, other professionals were also beginning to write more openly about the lack of consistent curricula, evaluations and certifications across executive protection training.

We Were Also Willing to Apply the Questions to Ourselves

One of the most important pieces of ISA’s standards history came from our 2019 program-evaluation work. In Executive Protection Training Standards & Program Evaluation, we used questions raised by longtime friend and mentor, security-driving and training professional Tony Scotti, to examine our own program.

Three of those questions went directly to the point: “What is the standard that I will be trained? How will I be measured to that standard? Where is the standard documented?”

Those remain good questions for a prospective student to ask any training provider, including ISA. Our evaluation examined the standards behind the curriculum, instructor qualifications, relevance of the material, how students were evaluated and whether the program continued to meet the commitments we made when it was developed. The review also described our use of FLETC protective-service training as an important model and the incorporation of state regulatory requirements into the program.

That kind of self-examination is one of the things that makes a standards system credible. If I am going to ask another organization when it last reviewed its standard, how it measures results or whether its documentation is current, ISA has to answer the same questions.

In fact, while reviewing our material for this series, we found something that needed to be updated. Our published Executive Protection Training Syllabus referenced the 2020 edition of the FLETA Procedures and Standards Manual. FLETA has since published a 2025 edition. ISA does not claim FLETA accreditation, but we do use applicable FLETA procedures and standards as a voluntary quality-assurance reference. If we are going to cite that framework, the reference should be current.

We Were Still Making the Same Argument in 2024

ISA’s later standards work did not abandon those earlier principles. In Executive Protection Training Standards, published in 2024, we again argued that simply adding topics to a course is not enough.

The learning objective has to state what the student is expected to learn, understand, evaluate, discuss or demonstrate, and the program needs a standard against which that performance can be judged.

The article put the point plainly: “Without these standards to grade or evaluate a student’s ability to do the job of an agent there is no purpose or reason to attend training.”

The language is blunt, but the principle is the same one that has guided this work from the beginning. Training is not successful because the instructor completed the presentation or because the student received a certificate. Training is successful when the student can demonstrate the required knowledge, skill and judgment to the defined standard.

External Scrutiny Still Matters Today

ISA has always believed that meeting external standards is important to our success and critical to our graduates. Virginia provides one avenue through its Personal Protection Specialist licensing system. The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services currently lists Independent Security Advisors for 32E Personal Protection Specialist Entry-Level and 32I Personal Protection Specialist In-Service training.

North Carolina provides another. The North Carolina Private Protective Services Board currently lists ISA NC PPSB Fundamentals of Personal Protection and the ISA Dignitary Protection Studies Program among courses pre-approved for Close Personal Protection licensing purposes. The Board’s continuing-education list also identifies ISA’s Private Security EP Operations course as an approved program.

The South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy’s 2026 Institutional Provider Catalog approved ISA’s Dignitary and Executive Protection Specialist program as lesson plan 5365, with 70.5 hours of training.

None of these facts means ISA is right about every question involving executive protection standards. State approval is not sainthood, and regulatory compliance is not the beginning and end of the professional-development discussion. What these examples establish is that our standards philosophy has operated in environments where somebody outside our company gets a say.

State Requirements Matter, but a Minimum Is Still a Minimum

ISA has never argued that a state’s minimum training requirement represents the maximum level of professional competence. Our article Executive Protection Training Standards: The Minimums made that argument directly.

Minimum requirements matter because they establish a legal floor, but a serious professional should understand that the floor is where development begins, not where it ends.

Our early use of the phrase national standard also deserves some explanation because my thinking has become more precise over time. I support common professional expectations, measurable standards and independent competency testing, but I also believe the states have a legitimate regulatory role that should not be challenged by a private organization or by the appearance of a national label.

A state establishes the legal requirements for work within its jurisdiction. A professional standard can provide additional consistency from one state to the next. Employers establish mission-specific qualifications, and training organizations prepare people to meet those qualifications and should exceed them.

Those roles are related, but they are not the same thing.

From Training Standards to Independent Competency Certification

By 2025–2026, our work had moved beyond the question of whether executive protection needed measurable training standards. We began focusing on an independent certification system designed to test whether an individual actually possesses defined executive protection knowledge and skills.

That is an important distinction. A standards document can describe what should be known or performed, and a training program can prepare someone to meet those expectations, but neither automatically proves that an individual can actually perform to the required level.

Independent competency assessment is intended to answer a different question: Can the individual demonstrate the knowledge and skills the profession says matter?

That does not replace state licensing. State licensing remains where it belongs—with the states. Nor does certification replace relevant experience, continuing education or employer-specific requirements. Those are different parts of professional competence and should not be confused with one another.

That shift from defining standards to independently verifying competence is the reason I began looking outside the executive protection industry for established certification models that already separate education, experience, testing and demonstrated skill. One of the clearest examples is the automotive industry’s ASE model.

In Executive Protection Needs an ASE Model, I lay out how a similar approach could work in executive protection: test an agent’s knowledge, require demonstration of skills that cannot be adequately measured on paper, require real and relevant executive protection experience, establish recertification so the credential remains current, and leave state licensing where it belongs—with the states.

The point is not that executive protection should copy another profession word for word. The point is that we do not have to invent every part of a competency-certification system from scratch. Other industries have already learned how to distinguish training from testing, course completion from competence, and a credential from a license. That is the next part of this standards discussion.

A Standard Has to Survive Contact With Reality

After all these years, my view of standards is probably simpler than it was when we started. Whether training soldiers, law-enforcement officers, protective personnel or security organizations overseas, the principle has remained remarkably consistent: a standard does not become meaningful simply because it was written down and approved by an organization.

A standard becomes useful when it improves the people and organizations expected to work under it. If it improves training, testing, organizational performance and professional judgment, then it is doing what a standard should do.

That is why recognition, implementation, accessibility and measurement matter. A document may be technically sound and still have limited value if practitioners cannot reasonably use it, employers do not understand how to apply it, training providers cannot train against it, or nobody can determine whether an individual actually meets it. The paper matters, but what happens after the paper matters more.

Standards Should Serve the Profession

ISA’s position today is built on more than a decade of working through this problem. We support meaningful professional standards, state regulatory authority, measurable training, continuing professional development and independent assessment of competence. Training organizations should be able to explain what they teach, why they teach it, what standard applies and how they know a student met that standard.

What I do not believe is that publishing a document should make any private organization synonymous with the profession itself. Standards organizations have a role. State regulators have a role. Training providers have a role. Employers have a role. Certification organizations can have a role. The professional has perhaps the most important role of all: continuing to learn, gaining meaningful experience and demonstrating the ability to perform.

Standards should serve the profession—not become the profession.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long has ISA been working on executive protection training standards?

Independent Security Advisors traces this work to 2011, when the organization was developing close-protection training for law-enforcement personnel supporting elected officials. ISA subsequently pursued outside regulatory review and publicly advocated broader executive protection training standards years before the current ASIS and BEPP standards debate.

What does ISA mean by an executive protection training standard?

ISA uses the term to describe defined expectations against which training and student performance can be measured. A curriculum identifies what will be taught; a meaningful training standard helps establish what the student is expected to know or perform and how that performance will be evaluated.

Does ISA believe state licensing requirements are enough?

State requirements establish important legal and regulatory minimums, but ISA does not consider a regulatory minimum to be the limit of professional development. A practitioner may need substantially more education, practical training and experience depending on the protective mission, client, threat environment and applicable law.

Is an ANSI American National Standard a federal executive protection standard?

No. ANSI is a private nonprofit organization, and an American National Standard is a voluntary consensus standard approved through ANSI’s process. The designation does not by itself make the document federal law, a state licensing requirement or evidence that the entire executive protection profession has adopted it.

Does completing an executive protection course prove professional competence?

Not necessarily. Course completion establishes that a student completed the requirements of that particular program. ISA’s broader standards position is that training, testing, demonstrated performance, experience and continuing professional development are different parts of professional competence and should not be confused with one another.

Why is ISA discussing executive protection standards again in 2026?

Because the profession now has additional standards frameworks to evaluate, creating legitimate questions about purpose, implementation, accessibility, relationship to state regulation and the difference between a standards document and demonstrated individual competence. ISA approaches those questions from more than a decade of documented standards and curriculum work.

Related Executive Protection Standards Articles

ISA and EPTraining.us have been writing about executive protection curriculum, standards, competency and professional development for years. The articles below provide the larger record behind the position presented here.

Executive Protection Training Programs: New EP Instructors Beware, It’s Not Easy — The 2017 discussion distinguishing curriculum development from measurable standards of training.

Executive Protection Training Standards: A National Priority? — ISA’s 2018 examination of the effort to develop more consistent executive protection training standards.

Executive Protection Training Standards & Program Evaluation — The 2019 self-evaluation asking what standard students are trained to, how performance is measured and where that standard is documented.

Executive Protection Training Standards: The Minimums — Why state licensing minimums matter, but should not be confused with the upper limit of professional competence.

Executive Protection Training Standards — ISA’s 2024 discussion of learning objectives, measurable performance and why adding subjects to a course is not enough.

ISA Executive Protection Training Standards — ISA’s current training-standards overview and relationship to regulatory and external quality-assurance requirements.

Two Executive Protection Standards: The Question Joe LaSorsa Asked — A comparison of the ASIS Executive Protection Standard and ANSI/BEPP EPS-2026 and the questions practitioners, employers and training providers should ask before choosing a framework.

Executive Protection Competency Survey: The Odd Man Out — A review of the 2020 Executive Protection Professionals Core Competencies Survey and its relevance to today’s standards and certification discussion.

If Standards Matter, Who Gets to Read Them? — An examination of cost, accessibility and whether professional standards can influence a profession if practitioners cannot reasonably obtain and use them.

Who Owns the Language of Executive Protection? — A look at professional terminology, trademark claims and the importance of keeping established executive protection language available to the profession.

Executive Protection Needs an ASE Model — Parker’s proposal for independent competency certification based on testing, demonstrated performance, relevant executive protection experience and recertification.

Together, these articles document how ISA’s standards discussion developed from curriculum design and measurable training requirements into external review, state regulation, competency, accessibility and independent certification.

About the Author

Matthew C. Parker is CEO of Independent Security Advisors LLC and Director of Training for EPTraining.us. A retired U.S. Army Senior Non-Commissioned Officer, combat veteran, Master Instructor and protective-services practitioner, Parker has more than three decades of military, government, security, executive-protection, training and advisory experience in the United States and internationally.

For more than a decade, Parker has focused on a question central to the professionalization of executive protection: How do we turn standards into measurable performance? Through ISA and EPTraining.us, he has developed and evaluated protective-services training against regulatory requirements, external standards, operational practice and demonstrated competency.

His work has included executive and dignitary protection, national-level government and security advising, development and training of government protective personnel, law-enforcement training, and standards-based training programs in the United States, Iraq and Ukraine. His international experience includes advisory work involving the Government of Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government and later military, police and judicial-security organizations in Ukraine. Parker received the Iraqi Commitment Medal from the Government of Iraq for his contributions to Iraqi national security, becoming one of only three Americans to receive the distinction. Additional background is available on his ISA professional profile.

His position is straightforward: training prepares the professional; standards define expectations; performance demonstrates competence.