When I got to Ontario, I had no idea what I was doing.
I had a degree. I had experience. I had worked hard my whole life in the country I came from, and I arrived here thinking: okay, I know how to work, I know how to figure things out, I'll be fine.
And then reality hit.
I'm a civil engineer. I graduated from one of the top universities in the country I came from, and I was proud of that. Still am. But civil engineering in Canada is a regulated profession, which means my degree didn't just transfer over. I had to get it evaluated, figure out if I needed additional courses, go through the whole licensing process. And that process is long. Not weeks. We're talking potentially years.
I did the math. The money I had brought with me would run out long before I could even finish that process, let alone start working as an engineer. I needed a job. A real one, and soon.
This is something a lot of newcomers run into. It doesn't matter what field you came from. Medicine, law, engineering, accounting. If your profession is regulated in Canada, be prepared for a process that takes time and money you may not have right now. That's just the reality. And it doesn't mean your education or your experience doesn't count. It just means you need a plan for the time in between.
A few weeks after I arrived, I was looking for a place to live. I went to see an apartment, and the husband of the family I was visiting was from the same country I came from. He started asking me the usual questions. What's your background, what are you planning to do, how long have you been here?
When I told him I was a civil engineer trying to figure out my next move, he told me about security guard work.
He gave me the name of the company he worked for and said: this is a good way to start. You can pick your shifts, you can study on the side, you can work weekends if you find something else later. It's flexible.
I had never heard of security guard work before. In the country I came from, this concept doesn't really exist, not the way it does in Canada. So I went home, opened my laptop, and started looking into it.
This was 2011, and the regulation that made security guard training and testing mandatory in Ontario, the Training and Testing Regulation under the PSISA, had only come into force in April 2010. The PSISA itself had been passed in 2005 and came into force in 2007, but the part that required guards to actually complete a course and pass a government exam before getting licensed was barely a year old when I arrived. So it was brand new. Almost nobody knew about it yet.
I found some ads in the free newspapers you used to be able to pick up around the city. I called one of the training providers. They told me I'd need to pay around $250 to $300 for a week-long course, and that once I had my licence, I'd be in a good position to get hired.
I told a friend who had been living in Canada for almost ten years. He laughed. He said: no no no, this sounds like a scam. Nobody pays for training and then gets a job out of it. This doesn't exist here.
And I understood why he thought that. It was so new that even people who had been here for years didn't know it was real.
But I kept digging. I found the actual government information. I found the legislation. And I realized this is not a scam. This is just new, and people outside of the industry have not caught up to it yet.
So I signed up.
The course ran Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM. In a classroom. There was no online course. No doing it whenever you feel like it, no pausing a video and coming back tomorrow. You showed up every day.
My English at the time was okay, not bad, but legal language is a different thing entirely. Reading about the law, about use of force, about your rights and responsibilities as a security guard in Ontario. That's not the English you learned in school. And the CPR and first aid portion had a lot of medical terminology that I really had to work at.
My textbook ended up full of handwritten translations in my first language, squeezed in between the lines. That was how I got through it. That's what it took.
I'm telling you this because I don't want to oversell it. This is not an easy shortcut. It's a real course, it covers real material, and it requires real effort, especially if English is not your first language. But it is absolutely doable. I did it. A lot of people have done it.
I arrived in Ontario in June 2011.
By mid-August, I had finished the course. By the end of August, I had written the government licensing exam. By September, I had my licence. And by October 1st, I had a job.
Three and a half months from stepping off a plane to being employed, with a government-issued licence in my hand.
I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying it because when you're a newcomer and everything feels uncertain, it helps to know that this path has a timeline. It's not open-ended. There's a clear process, and if you follow it, there's a real outcome waiting on the other side.
In Part 2, I'll tell you what the job was actually like. Starting from the bottom, what I learned, how I moved up, and why I'm still in this industry fifteen years later.
Because here's the thing: I never went back to engineering. Not because I couldn't, but because what I found in security was something I didn't expect. And I want to tell you about that.
Part 2 publishes next week.
Mary is the founder of Calrex Training Academy and has worked in the Ontario security industry for over 15 years, starting as a newcomer with a freshly earned security guard licence and building a career that now spans emergency management and data analytics. She writes about security careers, licensing, and what it actually takes to build a life in this industry.