Not really. I'm hitting the stage where I'm contemplating closing the door on trying to get into intel / work for the government. I'm getting too old to be a "new hire" and start a new career. And the more I work with Federal employees, the less I want to have them as co-workers.
There's sort of a Catch-22 involved:
Private sector intel work doesn't care about your experience (or lack thereof), as long as you have an active security clearance (usually Top Secret, sometimes TS/SCI).
Government intel work doesn't care if you have a clearance or not (they'll do the footwork to check and clear you), but they want you to have years of experience.
The usual route to get around this is to be ex-military, where you would have come out with at least a clearance and possibly experience as well.
And then the vast bulk of those sort of jobs are up in the greater DC metro area, which is not particularly somewhere I want to live and raise my children. If it was just me, that'd be different.
Add to that the fact that I'm turning 37 in the fall, and many Federal agencies have an unofficial policy of not hiring entry-level folks older than 37, because the notion is that they're not going to be working for the government long enough to justify the hire. I've been butting my head against this wall for the last four years, ever since I got my master's. I'm tired of the headache and starting to recognize that I'm nothing but a glorified phone monkey who knows how to read a manual. Been doing this line of work for 18 years now, which is kind of pathetic, but it is what it is.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9714779 times)