Her Story
About Nicole
After working in property management and real estate, I decided I needed to figure out what I wanted to do next, and I realized I'd always wanted to go into law enforcement since I was a little kid. But at that time in my life, I was already in my mid-30s and a single mother of three kids, so I thought I was a little too old to go into law enforcement and didn't want to risk something happening. So I decided to go into corrections instead. I was with the state doing corrections for several years before I decided to leave and got a job with my current agency doing security. When I promoted to sergeant at my current facility, I came in and we had zero structure within our security department. Myself and my lieutenant at that time pretty much built it from the ground up. We had about half of our security camera systems down, only about 300 operational at that time, and to current date, we are at 712, and that's not even including the new hospital we're about to open. Right now I'm a lieutenant overseeing 26 security officers, and I'm about to take over as the interim manager for security at my hospital. I oversee pretty much a lot of the day-to-day operations at the hospital, dealing with cameras, video surveillance, badge readers, mag locks, fire egress doors, anything that's security-related. I'm also heavily involved with opening a brand new women's hospital that's attached to our current facility, another almost 400,000 square foot hospital.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Nicole
01What do you attribute your success to?
Honestly, I attribute my success to my parents. My parents taught me very early on about work ethics. I am very work motivated and work-driven, so I am that type of person that when I get into a job, I want to learn it all. I will do whatever I can to learn it, whether I have to ask one person or whether I have to ask five people to get an answer on something, I'm gonna get an answer. I want to be able to create something or to be able to build off of things, how to improve things, what would be in the best interest, do we need to take away from something. But literally, build the best environment and team build that you possibly can, but in order to do that, you also have to know things. So if I don't know them, then I can't do that.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would tell her to follow her dreams. I'd be like, figure, you know, do your... do some pros and cons. Do some research on what it is that you want to do. If you find out during that research that this is stuff that you can handle, just go for it.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenges would be just maintaining the budget side of updating security stuff. We're the ones that have to go around and be like, hey, this needs to be upgraded, hey, this needs to be upgraded, hey, we need this, hey, we need to change this. And then we have to kind of wait around and wait for budgeting purposes for a lot of that to get taken care of. Just trying to get other equipment installed, hey, you know, unfortunately this is going to cost $1.2 million to get taken care of. It's just trying to stay up with the times with the world that we are today.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Honesty and integrity are my two biggest values, because you can't have one without the other. You really can't. But with the field that we're in, you have to have the honesty, and you have to have the integrity. If you don't have even one of those, then judgment can be completely questioned by everybody.
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