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f you are a student or right at the beginning of your career, there are so many different directions you can take, and it’s not always obvious how you get from learning about security to actually building a career.


Qualifications are important, of course. So is developing your technical knowledge. But I think we sometimes underestimate how much of career development happens outside those things.


It is the people you meet, the things you volunteer for, the slightly daunting event you make yourself walk into, the competition you enter, the conversation you have with somebody doing a job you didn't even know existed. And particularly at the beginning of your career, those things matter.


If an employer is looking at a number of graduates with similar qualifications and relatively little professional experience, what are you going to be able to talk about that makes you different?


Creating opportunities to get involved


This is something we think about a lot through our NextGen work within the ASIS International UK Chapter.


I don't think our job is to tell young people what a successful security career should look like. The industry is far too broad for that anyway. What we can do is give people more opportunities to experience it, meet the people already working within it and work out where they might fit. ASIS International has a mentorship programme, which gives members the opportunity to connect with and learn from people across the profession. Having access to somebody who is further along in their career can be incredibly valuable, particularly when you are still trying to work out what your options actually are. Then there is the less formal side of it.


Within UK NextGen, we hold an annual speed mentoring event specifically to bring emerging professionals and more established people from across the security sector together in person.


We are also looking at how we create more direct routes into the industry. In early 2027, we will be hosting a dedicated careers fair alongside the ASC, BSIA and Security Institute, bringing emerging professionals together with organisations and employers from across the sector.


I am a huge believer in the value of actually getting people into a room together.


Navigating your early security


‘Networking’ can feel like quite an intimidating word when you are new to an industry. There can be this idea that you are supposed to walk into a room full of senior people, hand out business cards and somehow come away with a job. That isn't really how it works.


Sometimes you just meet someone interesting. You hear about an area of security you hadn't considered. Somebody introduces you to somebody else. Six months later you see them again at another event. Over time, you start to know people and, importantly, people start to know you.


That is your network


You don't need to walk into those rooms already knowing everybody. The whole point is that, eventually, you won't be walking into them knowing nobody.


Actually getting to do the job


The other part of this is experience. One of the things I feel quite strongly about is that


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if we want young people to come into security, we need to give them opportunities to actually do security, not just sit in rooms listening to the rest of us talk about it.


That is a big part of why we created the Security is You(th) Innovation Challenge. We piloted the competition in 2025 and are bringing it back on a larger scale on 15 October 2026. Students and emerging professionals work in teams on a realistic security and resilience challenge.


We give them a problem and let them work it out. They have to look at the information in front of them, identify risks, decide what matters, develop a response, work with people who might see the problem completely differently and then present and defend their recommendations.


And, inevitably, not everything goes perfectly. That's part of the point.


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