Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Holy Cow - a comment!

Sorry, Noah, I'm not used to getting comments.

If you want to switch from Financial IT to something along the lines of national service, you'll have a pretty tough go of it. Your best bet is to try to join a company that has government contracts and hope that it satisfies your itch. But, if you want to get a decent security clearance, I'll let you in on a little secret - cleaning companies.

There are a ton of cleaning companies that work for the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, etc. Each person doing the cleaning has to have some level of clearance - some have very high clearances. Those companies are usually willing to hire an IT guy at a low salary in exchange for getting you the clearance. Once you have the clearance, jobs are plentiful. The higher the clearance, the better the job. Beware, though, sometimes clearances can take a very, very long time to finalize. You could be a janitor for six months to a year or more, depending on the clearance level.

There are two other avenues I can think of - Foreign Service and straight GS work. Take the foreign service test, since they are always looking for good IT guys. You can also apply for a straight government position and keep applying until you land one. Those are often hard to get, since there is a bit of a good old boy network happening, but eventually you can land one.

Good Luck!

free web counters
Counter