If you haven't read Part 1 yet, start there. This picks up right where that one left off.
By October 2011, I had my Ontario security guard licence and my first job. I was ready. Or at least I thought I was.
My first post was outdoors. Twelve-hour shifts. And if you know Ontario winters, you already know where this is going.
I stood outside in the cold, in the wind, for twelve hours at a time. I was a civil engineer with a degree from one of the top universities in the country I came from, and I was standing at a gate checking people in and out. I won't pretend that wasn't a difficult adjustment. It was. There were moments where I questioned the decision.
But here is what I also noticed, pretty quickly: the job was teaching me things I couldn't have learned anywhere else.
When you work in security, you talk to people all day. Every kind of person, different backgrounds, different accents, different situations. You have to communicate clearly, stay calm, read a room, and make decisions quickly. There is no hiding behind a screen or avoiding difficult conversations.
My English got better faster than I ever expected. Not because I was studying it, but because I was using it constantly, in real situations, with real stakes. That is a different kind of learning entirely.
I also started to understand how things work here. How people interact with each other. What's considered professional, what's considered rude, what the norms are in a workplace, in a public space, in a confrontation. These are things nobody teaches you when you arrive. You absorb them, and the fastest way to absorb them is to be in an environment where you have no choice but to pay attention.
I know a lot of newcomers end up working within their own community, same language, same culture, familiar faces. I understand why. You've already left everything behind. You're tired. You want something comfortable. But staying in that comfort zone is also the thing that slows people down the most.
Security work pulled me out of that. It made me uncomfortable in exactly the ways I needed to be uncomfortable. And this is the truth: if you want to grow, you have to get uncomfortable.
I didn't stay at that outdoor post for long.
I moved into dispatching, coordinating guards, managing communications, handling incidents as they came in. Then into supervision, overseeing teams, doing site assessments, dealing with clients. Then into emergency management, which brought a different kind of responsibility entirely.
Each step taught me something the last one didn't. And each step was only possible because of the one before it.
This is something I want to be clear about because I think a lot of people look at security guard work and see a ceiling. They think: okay, it's a starting point, but then what? The answer is that the ceiling is higher than it looks from the outside, and how high you go depends mostly on how seriously you take the work.
I took it seriously. And it took me places I didn't expect.
When I was setting up the business account for my training company, the person helping me at the bank asked what kind of business I was starting. I told him: security guard training.
He looked up and said: did you work in security?
I told him yes, I still have ties to the industry, I've just moved into other things connected to it.
He smiled and said: I came here four years ago. I started the same way.
He was sitting across from me in a bank, in a professional role, building a career in Canada. And he started exactly where I started, with a security guard licence and a willingness to do the work.
I think about that conversation a lot. Because it's not an unusual story. It's actually a very common one. A lot of people in Ontario used security as the entry point, and then went wherever they wanted to go from there. Some stayed in the industry like I did. Some moved into law enforcement, emergency services, and corporate roles. Some went back to their original careers once they had their footing.
The job is a door. What matters is that you walk through it.
I never went back to engineering. Not because the option disappeared, but because I found something in this industry that I didn't expect to find. I found work that was genuinely interesting, that kept evolving, that gave me room to grow. I found a career, not just a job.
And now I'm building something to give back to the people who are standing where I was standing in 2011, confused, capable, and trying to figure out the fastest way to build a real life here.
If you're a newcomer trying to figure out your next move, I want you to know one thing: the path doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to move forward.
Be uncomfortable. Say yes to the thing that feels uncertain. Learn from the people around you, especially when they are nothing like you. That discomfort is not a problem. It's the whole point.
Over the coming weeks I'm going to write about the practical side of getting into security in Ontario, how the licensing process works, what the exam covers, what the training involves, and what the job actually looks like day to day.
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.