Career Development in the Security Sector: The Personal Perspective

Is a career in the security and safety space worth considering? My answer is an unequivocal ‘Yes’, but I probably wouldn’t have given that response to this key question when starting out on my working life journey as I never planned to work in the security domain.

Now, more than three decades later, this profession has taken me from front line corporate security in London to Boardrooms, technology companies, conflict zones, universities, hospitals and organisations around the world. It has allowed me to work with some remarkable people, experience situations I could never have imagined and, ultimately, build a career around something with a very simple, but massively important purpose: helping to keep people safe. It almost didn’t happen.

This is partly my story, of course, but the reason for telling it isn’t really about looking backwards. It’s about challenging the idea that every successful career needs to be carefully planned and, perhaps more importantly, encouraging individuals who might never have considered security to take another look at a profession that has given me far more than I could ever have expected.

Discovering your career 

If you had asked a much younger version of me what I wanted to do with my life, the answer would have been easy: I wanted to be a chef. Not as a fallback. Not until something better came along. It was all I ever really wanted to do.

I dreamed of becoming a chef. I went to catering college, qualified as a chef and actually went on to run a restaurant. For a few years, I was living the career I had imagined for myself and had achieved exactly what I had set out to do. What’s more, I absolutely loved it.

Perhaps that’s an important part of this story. My career didn’t change direction because my original ambition was wrong or that I had failed at it. I succeeded at it. Life simply had another chapter waiting for me that I couldn’t yet see.

Looking back, though, there’s another thread that runs through almost every chapter of my career and, in truth, has probably shaped far more of it than I understood at the time. I’m dyslexic.

When I was younger, that certainly wasn’t something I regarded as an advantage. Traditional education could be challenging, and there were things that seemed to come naturally to others that required considerably more effort from myself. Perhaps that’s why, at least in part, becoming a qualified chef meant so much. I had found something I was passionate about, worked hard at it and proved to myself that I could succeed. That same determination has followed me ever since.

Over time, I’ve stopped thinking about dyslexia simply as something I’ve had to overcome. I’ve come to recognise that some of the characteristics associated with it have become something of a secret weapon in my career. I know I have to work harder at certain things, but it has also given me a drive that can sometimes feel machine-like. When I encounter a barrier, my instinct is rarely to accept that it cannot be crossed. Instead, I look for another route. If that doesn’t work, I find another one and another.

Dyslexia has also shaped the way in which I think. I don’t always process a problem in the same way as the person sitting next to me. I make connections differently, challenge assumptions and often see patterns or possibilities from another angle. There was probably a time when I was embarrassed by that difference. Today, I’m proud of it.

Another route

Perhaps it’s that willingness to find another route became particularly useful when, in the 1990s, life forced me to find one. I unexpectedly found myself unemployed and needing to work.

An opportunity arose to become a security officer at Deutsche Bank in London. There was no grand career strategy behind the decision. I needed a job. I still had my chef qualifications. That was my safety net. If this security ‘thing’ didn’t work out, I could always go back to the kitchen. I never did.

I was fortunate to work for a security manager, namely Andrew Foley, who saw something in me and gave me opportunities to develop. Over the next two years, I was promoted five times, eventually becoming a shift manager with responsibility for helping to protect around 14,000 people across 31 buildings in London.

This wasn’t a particularly quiet period in which to learn the profession. London was living with the threat of IRA terrorism, with commercial premises and the financial district among the potential targets. Banks were dealing with threats arriving directly through the post, including suspected anthrax and other hazardous substances. At the same time, bank Data Centres faced another very different threat: violent robberies targeting high-value computer equipment and chip sets.

All of this meant that the risks could look very different from one day to the next. Terrorism. Suspicious packages. Hazardous mail. Organised criminal activity. Violence. Threats posed to critical technology and infrastructure. Above all, protecting the thousands of people who worked across our buildings was paramount. Suddenly, safety and security wasn’t theoretical.

As a relatively young manager, I found myself thinking about evacuations, suspicious packages, potentially hazardous mail, access and perimeter security, major incidents and how you communicate with and protect thousands of people when the threat might be very real.

Looking back, it was an extraordinary environment in which to learn. It also made the scale of the responsibility very real and very quickly. When you’re responsible for helping to protect 14,000 people, decisions are not simply entries in a procedure manual. People are relying on you and your team to remain calm, exercise good judgement and know what to do when something goes wrong. That was when something clicked.

I had entered the industry through security, but I quickly realised that the responsibility was much broader. It was about safety and security. It wasn’t simply about guarding buildings or responding to incidents. It was about protecting people, understanding risk, communicating effectively, using technology, making decisions under pressure and creating environments in which people could feel and be safer. On somebody’s worst day, the people, processes and systems around them really mattered. I was fascinated by how all of those elements came together,

Without really realising it at the time, I had found my second career. As it turned out, this one would take me places I could never have imagined.

Broad profession 

One of the things I wish more young people understood about safety and security is just how broad the profession really is in the real world. My own career took me from front line operations into regional and global leadership.

From Deutsche Bank, I moved to Veritas, initially helping to establish safety and security capabilities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Following the company’s acquisition by Symantec, that developed into a much broader global technology and systems role. Exposure to technology then opened another door.

There was a move into systems integration, then software, professional services and business leadership. Along the way, I worked with CNL Software, IBM, ADT and VidSys across projects spanning corporate safety and security, Government, the defence sector, oil and gas and critical infrastructure.

As referenced, my career took me into places I could never have imagined. I found myself working in post-war and conflict zones, including being escorted through Iraq with eight armed bodyguards so that I could help design Command and Control systems to support forward operating bases and critical infrastructure.

Going from the relative safety of corporate environments into situations like that sometimes felt like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. There was danger, certainly. There was also excitement and the extraordinary experience of seeing places and situations that very few people are fortunate enough to experience. What stays with me most wasn’t the adrenaline. It was the burden of responsibility.

As a leader, I would often go first. Before asking members of my team to travel into those environments, I needed to understand the situation for myself and make a judgement about whether it was safe enough for them to follow. That changes the way you think about leadership.

It’s one thing to make a decision that affects a project, a deadline or a budget. It’s quite another to know that your judgement could determine whether you were putting one of your own people in harm’s way. Those experiences taught me lessons about leadership, risk, safety and responsibility that no management course ever could. They also reinforced something I had first begun to understand as a security officer in London: working in the safety and security arena ultimately means accepting responsibility for others.

I went from being the person using safety and security technology to helping design, implement, sell and transform the technology behind it, sometimes in environments where making sure everything was right really mattered. None of this was in the original plan. Perhaps that’s what has made the career so rewarding.

Taking another risk 

In 2014, another unexpected opportunity arrived. I joined a relatively small Australian safety technology company called CriticalArc. On paper, leaving the relative security of established global organisations for a start-up on the other side of the world probably wasn’t the safest career decision I’d ever made, but by then I had learned something: some of the best opportunities in my career had appeared when I was prepared to take a calculated risk.

More than a decade later, that decision has taken me on another extraordinary journey. I’ve had the opportunity to help build teams, enter new markets, work with organisations around the world and take on leadership responsibilities across many different parts of a growing international business.

Three years ago signalled one of the biggest leaps of all. My family and I packed up our lives in the UK and relocated to the United States. This time, the risk felt different. Earlier in my career, I had made decisions that took me into unfamiliar places and environments. Now, I was asking my family to take the journey with me: a new country, new schools, new friendships, a new community and a completely different way of life.

The original plan was relatively simple. We would relocate for a couple of years so that I could help to accelerate CriticalArc’s growth in the United States, building on what we had already achieved in Australia and the UK. As has been the recurring theme of my career, the plan changed.

Three years later, America is now home. My family has embraced the experience. We’ve built a life and community here. What started as another professional assignment has become another chapter none of us could have fully anticipated.

Professionally, that journey has also led to another significant milestone: taking on the role of president of CriticalArc.

I sometimes think about the distance between that role and the young man who walked into Deutsche Bank due to the fact that he needed a job. Or, for that matter, the boy whose only real ambition was to become a chef.

There was no master plan connecting those points. There were opportunities, people who took chances on me, plenty of hard work, some difficult decisions and a willingness to keep stepping into situations where I didn’t necessarily know exactly how things would turn out. Through all of it, the purpose has become clearer.

I’ve had the privilege of working alongside an incredible community of colleagues and customers who share a common ambition: using technology, experience and collaboration to help organisations create safer environments and protect their communities. Today, as president of CriticalArc, I spend much of my time with universities, healthcare organisations, police officers and security teams, emergency managers, technology leaders and executives. The setting may have changed considerably from those early days in London, but the fundamental question hasn’t. ‘How do we keep people safer?’

Perhaps that’s the thread that connects a career I could never have planned.

Biggest misconception

When many people, particularly those considering their first career, hear the word ‘Security’, they immediately picture a security officer standing at a door or a gate. That role remains incredibly important. It was where I started, but the modern safety and security profession is so much broader and more expansive than that.

It intersects with technology, cyber security, Artificial Intelligence (AI), data, emergency management, healthcare, policing, behavioural science, communications, risk, resilience, consulting, engineering and executive leadership.

Importantly, safety and security are increasingly interconnected. Protecting a community isn’t simply about responding to traditional security threats. It can mean supporting someone who’s experiencing a medical emergency, helping a lone worker, co-ordinating a major incident, communicating during a crisis, protecting vulnerable people or affording someone a simple way in which to ask for help.

That breadth is one of the things that makes the profession so interesting. You can work in a university or hospital, at a technology company or airport, for a major corporation or a Government agency, a sports venue or, indeed, almost any organisation imaginable.

You might protect a building. You might design technology protecting an entire community. You might manage an Emergency Operations Centre, develop an AI capability, lead a global safety and security function, advise a Government, support a hospital or build a company.

I think we need to stop presenting safety and security as simply a collection of jobs and start presenting it as the profession and career ecosystem that it has become.

Not in the plan 

There’s enormous pressure, and particularly so when we’re young, to know what we want to do with our lives. Choose the qualification. Pick the profession. Build the career plan. Follow the path. There’s nothing wrong with having a plan.

I still believe in having something you can fall back on. For me, that was being a qualified chef, but I’ve learned that a career shouldn’t become a prison sentence to a decision you made at the age of 18 or 21. Sometimes an unexpected opportunity introduces you to an industry you knew almost nothing about. Sometimes somebody sees potential in you before you see it yourself. Sometimes you need to take a risk. Sometimes the role you accept simply because you need a job becomes the beginning of a career that takes you around the world.

My own career journey certainly hasn’t been a straight line. There have been risks, changes of direction, successes, failures and plenty of occasions when I’ve had to learn something completely new. I wouldn’t change any of that. 

As I reflect on more than a decade with CriticalArc and more than three decades since I first walked into Deutsche Bank as a security officer, I increasingly feel a responsibility to give something back to the safety and security profession that gave me so much. That means mentoring people where I can, contributing to the industry, supporting professional organisations and encouraging employers to look beyond traditional backgrounds when searching for talent.

Our profession needs different kinds of people. We need technologists. We need operators. We need communicators. We need engineers and data scientists. We need individuals who understand human behaviour and communities. We need entrepreneurs and leaders.

We also need to be careful about how narrowly we define talent. I think about that sometimes when I find myself standing in a university lecture theatre. As someone who’s dyslexic and didn’t follow a traditional academic path, there’s a certain irony in being invited into those environments today to speak to academics, police officers and security leaders, healthcare professionals and executives who’ve turned up to hear my perspective on campus and hospital safety. I don't take that for granted. Nor do I think it makes me any more intelligent than the people sitting in front of me in the room. What it reminds me of is the fact that expertise can be built in different ways.

Mine has been accumulated over decades: on the front line, in Control Rooms and Boardrooms, in post-war and conflict zones, through successes and mistakes, through building technology businesses and, most importantly, through listening to the people responsible for keeping communities safe.

The dyslexia that once made me question whether I fitted into certain environments has become part of what I bring to them. It makes me work harder. It makes me persistent. It makes me think differently. What’s more, I’ve learned not to apologise for that. I’m proud of it.

That’s another reason why I want more people from different backgrounds to consider safety and security as a profession. You don’t necessarily need to fit a predetermined mould to make an impact. Sometimes the person who thinks differently is exactly the person you need in the room. We need people who haven’t yet realised that they belong in this industry. I was one of them.

Worthwhile move?

Is a life in safety and security worthwhile? For me, absolutely. Not because every day has been easy. It hasn’t. Not because I planned it particularly well. I didn’t. Certainly not because I knew where that first security officer role would eventually lead.

I grew up dreaming of becoming a chef. I achieved that dream. I just didn’t know there was another one waiting for me. I didn’t map out a route from security officer to president. I certainly didn’t imagine that losing a job in the 1990s would eventually lead me to moving my family across the Atlantic, making the United States our home, becoming president of an international technology company and working with organisations around the world on something as fundamental as keeping their communities safe.

Perhaps that’s exactly the point. Plan your career. Develop skills. Have something you can fall back on, but determine to leave some room for the unexpected.

If you’re starting out, changing direction or simply wondering what comes next, take another look at safety and security. It’s a profession where you can build technology, lead people, travel the world, solve extraordinarily complex problems and make decisions that genuinely matter.

It may not be the career you planned, but it might just become the career you love.

Darren Chalmers-Stevens is President of CriticalArc and a Member of the International Foundation for Protection Officers UK Advisory Board (www.criticalarc.com)