Two in the morning, a flashlight, a fence line and a phone that has not rung in four hours. A lot of Richardson’s unarmed security work looks exactly like that, and the officers who are good at it are worth a great deal to the people who hire them.
The Night Post, Honestly Described
You take over the console or the guard shack, read the pass-down, and confirm the access list for the night. Who is authorized to be on site, and nobody else. Then you run rounds. Doors, gates, generator yard, loading area, roof access, the corners of the parking lot where the lighting is weakest. You scan checkpoints so the client can see the round was actually walked. Between rounds you watch cameras and you keep the log current.
Most nights, the notable events are small: a vendor technician arriving at an odd hour with a legitimate ticket, a door left unsecured by the cleaning crew, an alarm caused by wind. What the client is buying is that those small things are caught, verified against the access list, and written down accurately. When something is genuinely wrong, your job is to observe it, report it and call, not to intervene physically. Officers on posts like this are unarmed, and that is by design rather than by accident.
What Richardson Actually Hires For
Richardson has been a telecom and technology employment center for decades, and the buildings that come with that, office campuses, research and engineering facilities, data and network infrastructure sites, run some of the most disciplined access-control programs in North Texas. Layered over that is a large university population, a busy mix of hotels and restaurants, apartment and townhome communities, retail corridors and municipal facilities. The result is an unusual concentration of front-desk, lobby, gate and patrol posts within a very short drive of each other, most of them staffed by unarmed non-commissioned officers.
- Corporate reception and badge desks on office campuses
- After-hours perimeter and interior rounds at technology and infrastructure sites
- University-adjacent apartment and residential community patrol
- Hotel lobbies, event venue concourses and parking structures
- Retail center loss prevention and closing-hours coverage
- Municipal building entrances and visitor screening
So What Do You Need to Be Hired?
A non-commissioned security officer license, and to apply for one you must first complete the Level 2 training course required by 37 TAC §35.141(a)(1). Level 2 is the entry-level, unarmed course. There is no firearms training and no firearms qualification in it, and it does not on its own produce a commission. It is, however, the required first step toward one.
The material is prepared or approved by the Texas DPS Private Security Bureau and covers Texas security law, the professional responsibilities of a security officer, emergency procedures, and ethics. That is the curriculum of the night post described above: knowing the limits of your authority, knowing what your obligations are, knowing what to do when an alarm turns out to be real, and knowing where the line is when nobody is watching. Your certificate of completion (PSP 36) goes in with the license application.
Level 2 can be delivered either by a licensee’s own designated person or by a DPS-approved school with a DPS-approved instructor (§35.141(a)(1), §35.142, §35.143), which is a flexibility Level 3 does not have. If you would rather not wait for an employer’s next in-house session, our online Level 2 class runs 100% online and the certificate is yours to take to whichever company you choose.
A Small Advantage of Staying Unarmed
Under §35.161(b), noncommissioned security officers are specifically exempt from continuing education requirements. No CE hours to chase. Officers who later move up to the commissioned Level 3 credential pick up that obligation and satisfy it through the armed security renewal course. Plenty of good officers never make that move, and there is nothing second-rate about it.
If you want to see how the courses stack up before deciding, the class list lays out every course we offer, and common eligibility and application questions are answered on the FAQ page.
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