Make sure to avoid any role below your compensation goals!

Never be the first one to define salary expectations!

Be transparent when defining what you expect to earn!

So much advice. So many contradictions. So little time.

After a while, it’s hard to do anything but nod, smile, and get through the conversation without alienating your interlocutor. Yes, they’re just trying to help. No, you don’t have to do what they recommend.

The constant barrage of opinions is part of why I see little value in an informational interview phase. Action resulting in interviews becomes the best teacher. Everything else is window dressing.

Informational interviews can help you understand roles, employers and market language. What they cannot tell you is which compensation strategy will work for you. The person offering advice does not have your background, alternatives, risk tolerance or exact interview panel. Eventually, the market has to answer the question.

Still, this doesn’t make dichotomies easy to navigate. Or untangle. So experiment.

Salary advice is a collection of hypotheses. Your interview loops are where you test them.

When you’re running the strategy at an optimal level, you should have at least two interview loops in parallel. Rather than apply the same approach to both, try an A/B test. While this isn’t going to be a truly scientific experiment, as there will be plenty of variables outside your locus of control, you can still get a feel for what advice works best for you.

Turn the A/B-test idea into a practical protocol:

• Define an finacial outcome before either conversation

  • Compare total compensation, not merely base salary

• Change one variable at a time

  • For example, reveal your total compenstation goal or avoid defining a number

    • A - “Based on the scope we’ve discussed, I’m targeting total compensation between X and Y, depending on the base, bonus, equity, and benefits mix.”

    • B - “I’d like to understand the scope and level before defining a number. Can you share the budgeted compensation range?”

• Use reasonably comparable roles

• Record what the recruiter disclosed, how they responded and whether this resulted in an interview loop offer

• Treat each outcome as an observation, not a conclusion

  • A screen-out is not necessarily failure if it reveals that the employer cannot meet your financial expectations

  • Conversely, advancing after defining a low number is not necessarily a win

Your objective is not to discover a universally correct salary script. You need to learn which approach fits feels authentic and allows you to get closer to your goal of landing multiple offers.

An A/B test isn’t limited to salary. You can do this for other negotiations points as well as approaching questions to common interview questions. Finding your own way is a major part of this career move. There’s plenty to discover and create as you build a path to success.

Advice is useful. A compensation framework is better.

For the next five days, FormerFed readers can get Unlock a Lucrative Career in 10 Steps for 75% off. Use it to define your floor, compare total compensation, and decide which numbers to test before your next recruiter conversation. Code is here.

One of the hardest questions when leaving government is also one of the most basic:

What should I search for?

If you were an intelligence analyst, you search for intelligence jobs. If you worked in diplomacy, you look at government affairs. If you were a security officer, you search corporate security. If you managed programs, you look for program manager positions.

That makes sense. It may also cause you to miss some of the best opportunities available to you.

I’ve been thinking about this while starting to build Acacia Talent Partners with a former colleague. We’re trying to help people from the intelligence, military, diplomatic, law-enforcement, and broader government communities make the transition into commercial careers.

As part of that work, I’ve started collecting job postings and looking at them a little differently. Rather than asking whether the title sounds like a government job, I’m asking:

What does this company actually need someone to do, and where might someone have learned to do that?

The answers have surprised me.

The title trap

Consider a job I recently found at Hershey: Manager, M&A Competitive Intelligence & Strategic Projects.

A government intelligence analyst might see “M&A,” assume they lack the requisite background, and keep scrolling.

And they might be right. Hershey wants real commercial and financial fluency.

But look at the work underneath the title. The company wants someone who can take ambiguous strategic questions, structure research and analysis, assess competitors and markets, challenge assumptions, develop scenarios, synthesize different streams of information, and turn that work into recommendations for senior leaders.

That should sound familiar to a lot of people who have worked in intelligence.

Or consider Head of Operations, Global Affairs at Electronic Arts.

EA is looking for someone to help run a roughly 200-person organization spanning Legal, Government Affairs, Procurement, Business Development, and Corporate Development. The work includes budgets, talent planning, technology adoption, AI initiatives, vendors, organizational processes, and major cross-functional projects.

A former senior government official may never think to search for that job.

But someone who has run an embassy, headquarters element, large program, interagency effort, or complex mission has probably dealt with people, money, technology, competing priorities, senior stakeholders, and organizational change.

The title is different.

Some of the problems aren’t.

Look for the problem, not the title

This is the shift I’ve started encouraging people to make.

Instead of asking:

What private-sector job corresponds to my government job?

Ask:

What problems did people repeatedly trust me to solve?

Those are very different questions.

Your government title is partly a product of the institution that employed you. It makes sense inside that institution because everyone understands the organizational structure, authorities, mission, and vocabulary around it.

A commercial employer doesn’t have that context.

They have problems.

They need someone who can make sense of incomplete information. Build a program from scratch. Brief an executive. Manage a crisis. Understand a difficult customer. Navigate a bureaucracy. Evaluate risk. Coordinate people who don’t report to each other. Protect a senior principal. Figure out why a technology isn’t being adopted. Turn an ambiguous question into something an organization can actually act on.

Those capabilities can appear under titles you would never think to search.

Sometimes the bridge is obvious

Some commercial employers make the translation relatively easy.

Amazon recently advertised for an Intelligence Analyst, Global Security Intelligence. The work includes OSINT, threat analysis, intelligence production, briefing, customer requirements, and collection. Amazon explicitly identifies intelligence and military analytic experience as relevant.

PsiQuantum is looking for a Senior Director, U.S. National Security Partnerships who understands the Intelligence Community and defense ecosystem, requirements, acquisition, budgeting, emerging technology, and how government turns capabilities into programs.

Those transitions don’t require much imagination.

Others do.

Anthropic’s Executive Services Program Manager, for example, isn’t called an intelligence or national-security job. Yet the company specifically identifies experience in intelligence analysis, threat assessment, investigations, executive protection, or security operations as useful.

The trick is learning to recognize your capabilities when they appear in someone else’s vocabulary.

What’s your second capability?

There is an important caveat here.

Translation is not the same thing as qualification.

Just because you spent ten years analyzing geopolitical developments doesn’t mean you’re qualified to do M&A strategy at Hershey.

And being a government analyst doesn’t qualify you for a Director of Procurement Intelligence role requiring machine learning, statistical modeling, supply-chain expertise, and enterprise data platforms.

Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

What I think matters is the combination of capabilities you bring.

Maybe you’re:

Intelligence + finance

National security + emerging technology

Security + program building

Government leadership + enterprise operations

Intelligence + AI/data

Diplomacy + client engagement

Your government experience may give you judgment, tradecraft, domain expertise, leadership, or an ability to operate under uncertainty.

Your second capability may be what makes that experience commercially valuable.

This also changes how you tell your story.

“I spent 15 years in the Intelligence Community” tells an employer where you’ve been.

“I spent 15 years helping senior leaders make decisions with incomplete information, and I’ve spent the last three building and deploying AI-enabled tools that improve that process” tells them something about what you can do for them.

That’s a very different proposition.

Try a different kind of job search

If you’re thinking about leaving government, or you’ve already left and are struggling to figure out where you fit, try this exercise.

Put your résumé aside for a few minutes.

Write down the five hardest problems people repeatedly trusted you to solve.

Not your responsibilities. Not your billets. Not your job titles.

Problems.

Then ask yourself:

What capabilities did those problems require?

Which of those capabilities would matter outside government?

What’s my second capability?

What commercial organizations have similar problems?

What am I missing to be credible there?

That last question is important.

Sometimes you’ll discover that the gap is mostly vocabulary. You already know how to do the work, but you aren’t describing it in a way the employer recognizes.

Sometimes the gap is experience. You understand the problem but haven’t solved it in a commercial environment.

And sometimes you’ll discover that you’re simply not qualified for the job.

That’s useful information too.

See the whole candidate

This is one of the ideas we’re exploring through Acacia.

Most résumés tell you where someone worked and what positions they held.

We’re interested in what sits underneath that: what problems they’ve solved, what capabilities they’ve developed, what environments they’ve operated in, and where those things might create value next.

That requires looking differently at jobs too.

The goal isn’t to convince employers that every former intelligence officer, diplomat, military officer, or federal employee can do anything.

It’s to make the genuine connections visible.

So if you’re looking at the private sector and can’t quite figure out where you belong, I’d start with a different question.

Don’t ask:

What’s the commercial equivalent of my government job?

There may not be one.

Ask:

What problems have I learned to solve, who has those problems now, and what else do I need to know to solve them there?

Then start searching from there.

Connect

I’m continuing to explore these questions through Acacia Talent Partners, particularly how people coming out of government can better understand and communicate the value of what they’ve learned to do.

If you’re making that transition, have made it successfully, or hire people from government and have a perspective on what translates well (and what doesn’t), I’d be glad to compare notes.

You can reach me at ansel@acaciatalent.com

What is one difficult problem people repeatedly trusted you to solve in government? Reply or leave it in the comments. I’ll use the patterns, anonymously, to develop a practical follow-up on turning those problems into pitches and narratives that advance networking and interviewing efforts.

Leave a comment

In addition to the emotional decision that it’s time for you to leave, establish methods to build a book of data that justifies your new direction. This will bolster you in the dark hours of rejection. It will provide a rebuttal to hiring managers who question your potential.

A job-search OS

The combination of a target list, a weekly cadence, and a review process can produce meaningful action and progress.

Hypothesis → Targets → Outreach → Feedback → Review

In this instance, your hypothesis is a certain role or company: I should be a deployment strategist, or I can land a job at RTX.

From there, you start working through your network. Ask for input and intros. Probably best to pick a number of calls or coffees. The ultimate feedback is how close you can get to interviews.

Then, after a month, see how far you've gotten. Continue when you’re landing interviews; tweak the process when you’re not.

Action creates data, which in turn constructs clarity

Kyle Thomas’s How To Explain A Career That Doesn’t Add Up offers a useful example of this principle in practice.

An unorthodox career can look like a liability when hiring managers cannot immediately see how the pieces fit together. This goes double for a career pivot.

An early action is taking control of the narrative. Explain why you made important moves, including why you’re now leaving an established career for something new. Remember, this can be part of the 30-day market test. See which narratives feel best and which ones resonate.

A clear career story, purposeful networking and relevant proof can turn an initially confusing transition into a persuasive case for hiring.

It’s all about your network

My superpower bundle will help you identify the connectors and trailblazers already in your network, then turn those relationships into a focused transition strategy.

Keep in mind that this is tech jargon for cooperation across different parts of an organization. Former feds do this constantly. We work across offices, agencies, disciplines and job categories to advance complicated projects.

The experience is common in government. Explaining its value is not.

That gives the aspiring former fed an opportunity to separate themselves from candidates who can name the functions involved but cannot explain how they led them toward a result.

To start with, try this. Choose one project and answer:

• Which functions were involved?

• What conflict or constraint blocked the outcome?

• What decision did you own?

• What changed because of your involvement?

Then write one sentence:

I brought together [functions] to overcome [constraint], enabling [measurable outcome].

This is how you build a simple narrative to justify your potential. Remember, tech is always looking for people who know how to advance complicated organizations. What could be closer to the aspiring former fed’s skillset?

The timing matters. Recent tech hiring data shows employers placing greater emphasis on operator skills. Many former feds already possess them, even if they have never used labels like organizational change management or business transformation.

Here are a couple of older posts expanding on this theme. “Consistency Leads to Cash” made the case that career results compound through repeated action. “Cross-Functional, What?” helped readers recognize a capability they may already possess.

Cross-functional is not filler for your resume.

It is evidence that you can move complicated organizations. The current tech market is putting a premium on that ability. Your job is to prove you have done it consistently. Why not use the next 10 days to make it a reality?

Asking a broad, open-ended question makes it obvious you aren’t willing to do independent digging. You’re asking strangers to do your homework. That rarely produces the information needed to evaluate an opportunity, if any information at all.

Start with research. Then search LinkedIn for first-degree connections who work at the company or have worked there previously. Look for second-degree connections who can provide a warm introduction.

Preparation leads to better responses. Specificity leads to better insight. And targeted outreach works better than asking the entire internet to do your thinking.

Posting “Has anyone worked here?” won’t build the network you need. Learn how to identify the people who can broker introductions to recruiters, hiring managers and better opportunities. Get Network Superpower: Leverage Your Connectors for less than an overpriced latte.

These errors are typical and avoidable. There’s really no reason to repeat these. And yet, plenty of aspiring former feds do.

Expecting ordinary effort will create extraordinary results

Every person whose post-USG career you admire overcame obstacles to accomplish something novel. They didn’t have a paint-by-numbers guide. There wasn’t someone providing a job tailor-made for their skill set.

They too had the uncomfortable stumbles you’re about to face. Maybe a few months or a couple of years. The struggle and the uncertainty are real, as well as indicators you’re going in the right direction.

Should it seem too easy, it is. Easy means you’re settling and likely in a crowded area. In my experience, easy has been: contracting back to the office you just left, pursuing security and policy roles mainly because that’s where so many other formers are and interviewing for one job at a time. I could list plenty of other easy fallacies, but will stick to breaking these down.

How is returning to your former office as a 1099 instead of a W2 really transitioning? Are you going to be earning that much more? Is there increased fulfillment waiting when serving a mission in a position of less influence? What new talents are you developing? I don’t like this option at all. I dislike it so much that I would recommend staying put if this is all you can imagine doing next.

Make no doubt about it, I believe BD is the way. You want to attach yourself to revenue. Maybe you aren’t selling, but delivering. No problem. This is part of the team that ensures a company stays in business. Security, policy and other cost centers are not essential. Look at the teams of most early tech companies. It’s going to be engineers and maybe a few people on the sales team, often euphemistically described as BD instead. Even legal comes later, despite the need for all kinds of NDAs and contracts.

A job hunt is a numbers game. The best odds you can hope for are 50%, as there is likely at least one other person competing for the role you’re after. No matter how good a match something seems, it’s not yours until you’ve got an offer in hand. Even then, maybe better to keep interviewing until the day you start. Sure, things fall apart all the time.

From these examples, remember, you have to eschew the road well traveled. Put yourself out there. Accept the rejection. Don’t take no for an answer; all you need is one yes.

You keep asking for help without helping yourself

All those LinkedIn posts announcing you’re leaving government and open to any advice former colleagues are ready to offer. This is an excellent way to head off useful support. Serious people won’t help someone who doesn’t know how to help themselves.

What kind of message are you sending to the world with unanchored requests? Should any help come your way, will it really be what you’re in need of?

A major part of a career transition is introspection. This likely preceded the decision to leave. Use those thoughts to define what you’re after. There’s no requirement to have everything figured out. If you outsource that thinking or assume someone else can do it better, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Some of the best members of your network will challenge you. They’ll push back against your assumptions. You’ll have to prove yourself worthy of their assistance. That can never happen if “I don’t know, what do you think” is a constant refrain.

The only thing more likely to fail than these types of posts is using GoFundMe to activate your career transition.

Waiting for the perfect role

“ Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good" has to be one of the most repeated truisms in certain USG and USMIL circles. No surprise that it applies equally well to the career-transition world.

There’s no laboratory cooking up the perfect role for a former fed. If anything, you have to do the chemistry on your own. Mixing eye of newt and blood of rat to concoct a new escape plan (remember the need to be extraordinary?).

Don’t fall for the appearance of a perfect role, expecting the hiring manager to hire you on the spot.

If you really do want something customized, then you should just start your own thing. What better way to flawlessly match your experience than hanging out a shingle?

Delaying until you see the right thing just puts off the inevitable. You must start a career transition for it to occur. Otherwise you’re just roleplaying. Start interviewing. The more experience you have, the better you’ll get it. This includes experience finding out if a role or a team is the right fit.

Want to make the right move?

Replace vague requests, one-at-a-time applications and waiting with an executable strategy. My private group, Be More, Earn More, will help you decide where to aim and begin creating opportunities.

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As if the unifying mission renders all aspects of USG work bearable. The sense of service is motivating. But how much food does that mission put on your family’s plate Public service gives people a justification for sacrifice. But it can also become a trap when “mission” is used to explain away slow promotion and bad management

Tapping into a motivating mission isn’t the government’s province alone. This is part of Anduril’s mission statement:

Anduril is a defense products company. Unlike most defense companies, we don’t wait for our customers to tell us what they need. We identify problems, privately fund our R&D and sell finished products off the shelf. Ideas are turned into deployed capabilities in months, not years, saving the government and taxpayers money along the way.

Now compare that to CIA’s:

At its core, our mission is to gather and share intelligence to protect our Nation from threats. Our highest principles guide our vision and all that we do: integrity, service, excellence, courage, teamwork, and stewardship.

Plenty of motivation in both. In fact, Anduril’s has more specificity, which helps get people going rather than relying on platitudes. It tells you what the company does, what it values and why speed matters. That kind of specificity attracts ambition. It gives energy a direction.

USG often pays partly in meaning and status. That meaning is not fake. The status is not irrelevant. But neither should be treated as irreplaceable.

Former feds often overvalue broad institutional mission statements because they are used to them. Over time, some go a step further and confuse the institution with their identity. Leaving government can feel like losing a moral credential, as if the badge itself was the source of purpose.

But the more lasting asset is caring about consequential work.

Having a badge is not the only requirement for purpose. And leaving government does not mean leaving purpose behind. It may just mean finding a version of it that pays better, moves faster and fits the life you’re trying to build.

If you know your work mattered but struggle to translate it into the language employers use to hire, book a free 15-minute coaching call. We’ll pressure-test your story and turn “I served the mission” into a clearer case for why a tech company should hire you.

Some left because they had a clear plan. Some left out of desperation. Some left because they had no choice.

Regardless of the reason, they all hear how they need to stay motivated. That misses the point. A tougher problem is making federal experience legible to a market that does not automatically understand it.

There is now a bigger group of people leaving federal service before retirement and asking the same questions at the same time:

• What am I qualified for outside government?

• How do I explain my years of experience without sounding bureaucratic?

• Will hiring managers understand the scale and complexity of what I handled?

• Do I need to start over?

• Why do jobs that seem related remain out of reach?

The anxiety comes from entering a new market that often doesn't understand the federal context unless the explanation is rock solid.

Aspiring former feds usually do not need to be convinced that their experience mattered. They need to understand how a hiring manager views it.

A federal career says:

• program management

• stakeholder engagement

• policy implementation

• interagency coordination

• oversight

• compliance

• operations

• mission delivery

A tech employer may be looking for:

• customer operations

• risk and trust

• product operations

• implementation

• program delivery

• vendor management

• regulatory strategy

• go-to-market support

• enterprise customer success

If you don’t connect the dots for how experience in policy implementation sets you up for success in handling regulatory strategy, then you’re never gonna make it. A recruiter is not going to slow down and decode your background. Not because employers are hostile to federal experience. Some are. Most are simply busy, filtering for the language they already understand.

If your resume requires the reader to understand your agency, grade level, authorities and other nuances, your expectations are misaligned. You’re also being lazy, expecting someone else to figure it out on your behalf. Why should they? What’s in it for them? They’re looking for the best person to fill an open role. If that’s not you, they aren’t going to lose any sleep over it.

Dumbing down your experience isn’t the answer. But you do need to understand how to equate it to business-relevant consequences:

• What risk did you reduce?

• What process did you improve?

• What decisions did you enable?

• What changed because of your involvement?

Don’t start stuffing tech buzzwords into your pitch. Find the tech equivalent of work you’ve already done. The goal is to make the value visible to someone who has never worked in government. The people who tend to do better often do not have the most impressive titles on paper. It’s those who can explain their experience in terms that resonate with recruiters and hiring managers.

They start with:

• “I managed a multi-stakeholder implementation with high regulatory exposure.”

• “I helped operationalize a policy change across teams with conflicting incentives.”

• “I built repeatable processes in an ambiguous environment.”

This captures the interviewing team’s interest. Then the successful former fed digs into some data-backed anecdotes.

If you don’t put in the effort to speak in this new language, you’re going to struggle to even get to a recruiter screen. Worse than rejection, you’ll end up ignored. That can feel insulting.

But it is also fixable. By making it easier for the market to understand who you are and what you’re capable of doing next.

Your experience may already be stronger than you think. But until you translate it, recruiters and hiring managers will treat it as a mystery.

This is also why templates matter. Not because they magically get you hired, but because most former feds are trying to write from scratch every time: every resume bullet, every networking note, every follow-up, every explanation of what they did. A good template gives you structure so you can focus on making your experience legible.

You are already committed to the unwritten rules: managing up skillfully, waiting out the promotion schedule and staying close to the people who decide who gets the next title.

There is nothing mysterious about that route’s incentives, status and script.

But this Substack doesn’t serve followers of a well-worn federal path.

It is for those who have started to suspect that being excellent at the federal game may be limiting their long-term potential.

You know who you are. You too learned the rules. But you could never quite follow them in the approved way.

You wanted to move faster. You tested the premise. That kind of ambition can look impressive at first. Then it becomes inconvenient as it gets in the way of the required, gradual career advancement. Your colleagues start referring to you as someone who just doesn’t get it.

The federal system has a special way of rejecting the unorthodox. Sooner or later, it treats you like an infection and deploys the antibodies.

You get labeled as someone who, despite a lot of promise, will only go so far.

Eventually, you start to doubt yourself. You start to believe you deserve to get throttled.

But what limited your growth in government may be the exact thing that expands your potential outside it.

I remember what it was like. Over my two decades in government, I consistently attempted to outmaneuver the system. Where I served, being at HQS became more important than serving in the field. I thought I could buck that trend. My repeated attempts at unconventionality failed. So, I had a decision to make.

The system does worse than slow the ambitious down. It trains us to regulate our drive for fulfillment. You learned to self-censor ideas before sharing publicly. You try to read the bureaucratic tealeaves before pushing anything. A decade of that and inaction becomes habit. You stop noticing you do it.

Guard the flame of your rebellion. Tech has far more room for speed than government does. Nobody serious punishes you for testing limits when your work creates value.

If this hit a nerve, then look beyond just leaving government. You need to turn the parts of you that the system suppressed into a marketable story. Start with a Former Fed coaching call.

The fear runs a bad calculation. Grind through interviews as an outsider, take a junior title, spend five years earning back the standing you already have. This loses to the pension every time. It should. The inputs are flawed.

You don’t have to start over. It will seem like it.

The junior-title restart happens to people applying through postings. These are written for candidates a company already knows how to hire. A federal resume in an ATS won’t catch a recruiter’s attention if they can’t translate it.

Your network does the translating for you. A connector vouches for your attitude and aptitude long before any interview starts. Now the conversation is about the role.

The fear is front-loaded. The cost is paid in full before you start. The payoff of ignoring it comes after.

The fear peaks at month zero and then decays. During those first few months, you’re drowning in new vocabulary and concepts. Who do you want to become next? What companies match your style? When can you be most successful?

For the most part, the answers to these questions must come from within. But people will pose these queries as if you need to have them fully considered and finished at once. It will take time. The hardest part is committing to figuring it out. Give yourself some credit for having the guts to start.

The fog only clears after you start. If you want 15 minutes with someone who watched it clear for other feds, book the free call.

But does living a fantasy get you any closer to your goal?

In all likelihood, not only is the first or second company you’ll end up at one you’re not thinking about as you read this, but you could easily be in a role you haven’t thought of. Even then, in the beginning, when you’re searching, you can’t control which company hires. And for those that do, you’ll have a limited impact on their overall path to being a unicorn.

That’s because the way you transfer your skills and experience will remain a work in progress. Almost an artistic approach. You’ll go through consistent, laborious reflection and reinvention.

What you can control is the system you build and the diligence you put forth. You can control whether you’re in rooms where people talk about their work. You can control whether you listen to how they actually describe what they do versus the title. You can control whether you’re talking to people before you need something from them. Luck is when opportunity meets someone who’s already paying attention.

Remember, these are efforts you must own. Don’t ever outsource this process. Having someone else do the thinking for you will always end in disappointment. That’s why you need your own path. Yes, informed by the experience and advice of others. But still always yours. Not the carbon copy of a hundred other formers. This is how you end up in a new set of cubicles doing a different version of the job you wanted to leave behind.

Owning the process involves engaging in conversations where you may not yet know what questions to ask. You run the risk of dismissing seemingly solid advice simply because it does not align with your goals, even when those goals are more about how you feel than a specific set of desired outcomes. This requires constantly living with the nagging doubt that you might be choosing the wrong paths, and accepting that progress may appear slower than simply copying someone else’s route.

Of course, copying is seductive. You’ll see plenty of other former feds, apparently satisfied and thriving, as members of a cost center at some impressive private-sector logo. As you pursue these roles, you get to tell yourself you’re being strategic, not just guessing. It’s reassuring to point to someone who appears to have succeeded and say, “I’m doing that.”

Failing to introspect often leads to optimizing for the traditional perks of government work, like job security and status, only to realize too late that the role and company matter less than your true motivations. Alternatively, you may secure a seemingly ideal position but find yourself in an organization where everything moves sluggishly, beset with politics, consensus-building, risk aversion and so on. By then, you’ve invested time and convinced yourself it’s acceptable, even claiming that first post-USG role has given you everything you ever wanted. Without reflection, you risk losing sight of your core motivation for a career transition and settling for less than you deserve.

Before you commit to your path, see what the actual trade-off is. That's what fedmath shows you.

Where do these people come up with such fantastic figures? They would be better off writing fiction than planning a financial future.

Of course, plenty of us want to believe these bedtime stories. After all, it’s a glimpse into what awaits us in 10, 20 or 30 years.

There are plenty of compelling incentives, including a TSP and free or reduced healthcare, depending on your agency. I don’t doubt it does make sense to some people. But for plenty of others, it’s just a reason to stay put. And staying put feels better when you can convince others to do the same.

The pension math looks good until you factor in timeline and opportunity costs. 20-30 years working, then 30 years living to max out. The SpaceX employee got their $1M at 35 and had 50 years of optionality. A similarly aged GS-14 doesn’t see that value until they’re 85, if they’re still alive.

Seems like a good reason to do some math

If you stay until 55 (30 years of federal service):

• Pension formula: 1% × high-3 × years of service

• 1% × $150K × 30 years = $45,000/year for life

• Or at age 62+: 1.1% × $150K × 30 = $49,500/year for life

• 30-year pension total: $1.35M-$1.5M

• Total time to realize full value: 60 years (30 working + 30 retired)

  • If you die at 70: you only got $750K of the “promised” $1.35M

  • Critical constraint: You’re locked in (FERS only)

    • If you leave at 20 years (age 45): You can’t access your pension until age 62 under deferred retirement. You get 1.1% × $150K × 20 = $33,000/year starting at 62.

    • Alternatively, you can take a “postponed retirement” starting at your MRA, but it’s reduced by 5% per year if taken before age 62 (a permanent penalty).

      • You forfeit the last 10 years of pension accumulation AND have a 17-year gap with no income from your pension

    • You cannot leverage your federal experience for higher-paying opportunities without destroying your pension timeline

    • The pension is golden handcuffs: you must stay to 55+ to get the full benefit

    • Caveat: This applies to the FERS (Federal Employees Retirement System), which covers most federal civilian employees hired after 1987. Military retirement is completely different: they can access their pension immediately after 20 years of service, regardless of age. CSRS (Civil Service Retirement System), the older system for feds hired before 1987, has different rules but similar lock-in constraints.

• SpaceX Equity (No Lock-In)

  • Work ~10 years (age 25-35)

  • Company IPOs, equity worth $1M

  • Age 35 with $1M liquid and zero constraints

    • Can directly take higher comp offers at another company (keeping the $1M vested equity)

      • Build additional equity at the new company

      • Negotiate from a position of strength (not desperate to keep the job for pension)

      • Can retire entirely, take lower-stress roles, or pursue riskier ventures

  • 50 years to use the capital, compound it, or work strategically

A GS-14 consistently hears “just stay until 55, and you’ll be set.” That promise is also a veiled threat, as leaving before 55 means losing everything. The security of a pension results in a reduction of choice.

Equity, not pensions, builds wealth. A couple of solid exits ($500K, $1M each) get you to $1-2M liquid in 10-15 years. The pension requires 60 years to realize the same value. But don't take my word for it, or anyone else's, either. Run your numbers using my free calculator. Measure the gap between the two paths. Make your educated decision based on your potential, not on someone else's timeline.

fedmath.com is free

Plug in your GS level to see your pension timeline alongside an equity path. Run your scenarios. Then decide.

BD, sales and customer success all require exactly what ambitious feds do: understand requirements, identify the right people and make something happen.

Being on the revenue side means your contribution is measurable. That matters for compensation, advancement, and your own sense of fulfillment.

Cost centers get cut. Revenue generators get promoted. Cost centers don’t require you to justify your existence with outcomes. That’s comfortable and career-limiting. Safety and security jobs in private industry are about mitigating risk, not creating value. These roles have a gravitational pull. Easy to explain, easy to get, hard to escape.

A frequent criticism of sales roles is the stereotype of being like a used car salesman. And what, exactly, is wrong with used car salesmen? As if there aren’t any good ones, or there’s no need for used vehicles. Plenty of people prefer buying used cars. They’re looking for a deal and are happy to pay the right price. Who’s going to sell them those cars?

Sales produce revenue. No revenue, no company. The money doesn’t appear out of thin air. And it ain’t easy to get.

There are plenty of ways to sell. Just as there are many roles on the revenue-generating team.

So what is it about sales that scares aspiring former feds?

Sales is hard. Rejection is constant and visible. Everyone sees your numbers.

Yet, if you can sell, you will never be unemployed. Recruiters constantly chase strong salespeople. They’ll negotiate on your terms. The market doesn’t care about pedigree when you have a track record of revenue.

As much as the money matters, the absolute advantage is optionality. Once you prove you can sell, you’re never waiting for a posting. You’re never hoping someone picks you. Picking and landing your next role just becomes another sales cycle.

Many aspiring feds don't realize they already know how to sell. Take those who worked overseas. A PCS is actually the clearest example: understand headquarters requirements, understand local requirements, identify the gap, take action. That's a sales cycle. You've been doing it the whole time.

The skills don't transfer literally, but structurally. You can't put your specific USG work on a resume, but you can describe the ability to read a room quickly and move someone from skeptical to committed. You mapped stakeholders. You assessed what each side needed. You found the gap. That's sales.

You already know the safe choice feels good in the moment. Let's talk about what it costs over five years. Schedule a call.

The cap table and the business plan won’t tell you whether they can. You have to judge it by the people building the product and whether they can actually deliver.

That means understanding who the company attracts and keeps. Not the founders or the executive team. The engineers. A core technical team that’s expanding is an exciting prospect.

If you're not an engineer, you're probably assuming you can't evaluate the engineering team. You can by understanding who the company hires and how long they stay. This is information anyone can obtain even though most people never bother.

You’re probably not going to get deep into this before you join. So start learning on day one.

Hunt, hire, hold

An experienced engineer joining an early-stage company has already done the assessment you’re trying to do. Someone eight years into a career, with an above-market salary and vested equity elsewhere, does not reset their clock on a bad bet. They’ve talked to the founders, looked at the architecture, and decided the problem is worth solving with lucrative outcome. Their presence is a positive sign.

A company past its Series A lacking tenured engineering talent means experienced people looked at it and said no. By that stage, the company has enough capital to pay well, even if it’s mostly in equity, and enough of a product story to make the bet worth considering. If senior engineers still aren’t joining, or staying, there’s something lacking.

The recruiting function tells you how seriously the company treats talent as a strategic priority. Is the recruiting team growing? Are they going after experienced hires and new grads at the same time? A company that wants to build for the long term is on campus at top universities before it has open roles, building relationships before it needs to fill them.

When a founder attends a domain-specific conference to speak or demo, a company serious about hiring sends a recruiter with them. A computer vision company should have someone at CVPR ready to have these conversations. If they don’t, recruiting is something that happens to them, not an outcome they own.

Equity usually vests over four years; the first year is a cliff. Leave before that year is up and you get nothing. When experienced engineers leave before they’re cliff or with a lot of equity still on the table, they’re deciding not to send good time after what’s been wasted.

Look at how long the senior team has been there. Asking an engineer whether the team has stayed stable will yield insight. If a company brought in five senior engineers two years ago and three are gone, those three walked away from unvested equity. Something was wrong enough that the potential payout wasn’t worth staying for.

A counterintuitive sign

The harder an engineer is to pull away from their work, the better. Chaotic, unreliable and toxic are different discussions. Look for the ones pushing back on product ideas that don’t make business sense. They resist being pulled into meetings that have nothing to do with what they’re building. They’re welcoming to new teammates and they want the company to succeed. But they guard their time because they want to see their work actually ship.

Come to them with a request and they’ll ask why. How does this make the company money? What customer problem does this solve? Why does it fit with the current roadmap? You have to prove the logic of your ideas before you earn the right to demand their time and focus.

A team that scrutinizes requests is protecting the product roadmap. Every unexamined yes costs time and money. At a startup, there is no budget for squandered effort.

The engineers to worry about are the ones who agree to everything, join every call and never push back. They’ll build whatever you ask whether or not it moves the company forward. That’s how the runway disappears.

What to look for

Start with why the engineers joined. One who leads with the problem or the team made a calculated bet. Another who leads with location or the vesting schedule chose a job. Which would rather rely on?

Ask if they'd recruit their friends. An engineer who says yes without qualifying it is putting their reputation behind the answer. Engineers talk to each other. A bad referral follows you. The ones who hedge are doing so for a reason.

Ask what they'd change. Someone invested in the outcome has a specific answer. Vague answers, or problems that are always someone else's fault, mean the engineer has already mentally left.

Two companies can show you the same valuation with the same equity package. One has a senior engineering team that’s growing, staying and protecting the technical roadmap from bad decisions. The other is losing experienced people and backfilling with engineers who haven’t been around long enough to know what to push back on.

All of this is the answer to one question: is the equity on your offer letter real? The engineering team is where you find out.

Most people read something like this, do one or two LinkedIn searches and call it due diligence. The harder questions are what actually tell you whether you’re holding a lottery ticket or the start of something real. That’s the conversation Be More Earn More members have before they sign. Check it out today.

I’ve written before about how to actually value the equity in an offer, and why it’s the part of the package that tips the scales more than base, bonus, or benefits combined. It can go to zero. It can be the start of generational wealth.

Once you establish that you’re receiving equity, the next step is to determine its value, which is directly related to the company rather than a spreadsheet.

Know what you hold

So, do you have ISOs, NSOs or RSUs? What does that even mean?

ISOs, incentive stock options. The right to buy shares at a fixed strike price, with tax treatment built to reward you for holding. Only employees can get these. You pay nothing at grant. When you exercise, you pay the strike price to buy the shares, and for regular income tax purposes, there’s nothing due at that moment. But the spread matters, meaning the difference between the strike and the fair market value (FMV) on the day you exercise. FMV is the official price per share, set by the company’s most recent valuation. That spread counts toward the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), a separate tax that can hit on top of your regular income tax, so a large exercise can hand you a tax bill even though what you purchased remains relatively illiquid. Hold the shares at least two years from grant and one year from exercise, and the whole gain from strike to sale is taxed at the lower long-term capital gains rate.

NSOs, non-qualified stock options. Similar to ISOs. The right to buy at a strike, but without the tax-favored treatment. Companies can hand these to anyone, including contractors and advisors. When you exercise, the spread is taxed right away as ordinary income, the same bucket as your salary, and your employer withholds on it. After that, any further gain is a capital gain based on how long you hold. Simpler than an ISO. Usually a bigger tax bill.

RSUs, restricted stock units. Not an option at all. There’s no strike and nothing to buy. The company is pledging to hand you actual shares once they vest. Because you didn’t pay for them, they can’t go underwater the way options can. At a public company, they’re taxed as ordinary income at vesting, on the full value of the shares the day they land, reported right alongside your salary on your W-2. That same vesting-day value becomes your cost basis, so whatever the stock does afterward is a capital gain or loss when you sell, long-term if you hold more than a year past vesting. At a private startup, RSUs usually have a double trigger: they only convert and become taxable once two things happen: your time-based vesting and a liquidity event, such as an acquisition or IPO. That’s why RSUs are rare at seed stage and common once a company is large or public.

One thing applies to all three. None of it is yours until it vests. Almost every grant runs on a four-year schedule with a one-year cliff, which means you earn nothing if you leave inside the first year. After that cliff, usually a quarter of the grant becomes yours. The rest releases in pieces over the subsequent three years.

Be sure to understand the company’s vesting schedule. Hitting your 365th day doesn’t drop shares into your Carta account that morning. Depending on the plan, you wait until the next scheduled date, monthly or quarterly, for the next batch to actually vest. None of this is a mystery. The exact dates are set out in your grant agreement, so you can map out the entire schedule in a few minutes.

RSUs at a public company carry one more wrinkle. Your offer is usually written as a dollar figure, and the company converts it into a fixed number of shares using a trailing average of the stock price, typically over 20 to 40 trading days ending around your grant or start date. That average, rather than the price on any single day, is what sets how many shares you get. If the stock ran up in the weeks before you started, the average comes in below the spot price, and you get more shares. If it slid, you get fewer. Either way the share count locks in, and from there the value rides on where the stock goes. The first year is also often prorated to align with the company’s normal annual grant cycle, so check whether your first grant is full or partial.

An RSU example

Take an offer with a $180,000 RSU grant at Palantir. The company doesn’t pledge a share count. It’s $180,000 in stock, converted into shares by dividing that amount by the average closing price over the 30 days preceding the grant. From there it’s a standard schedule. A quarter of the shares vest after one year, then another sixteenth of the grant each quarter for the next three years. The number on the letter is the same for everyone who signs it, though what it pays out is not.

“Bad” timing. Someone who signs near the 2021 peak gets their $180,000 converted at an average around $22, which locks in roughly 8,200 shares. On paper, the first-year chunk reads as $45,000, about 2,000 shares. But Palantir spent 2022 sliding, and by the time those shares vest, the stock is trading around $8, on its way to an all-time low of $5.92 that December. Two thousand shares at $8 is roughly $16,000, and after the company sells a slice to cover tax withholding, what lands is closer to $10,000. The offer shows $45k while the deposit is a quarter of that.

“Good” timing. Someone who signs near the bottom gets the same $180,000 converted at an $8 average, which locks in about 22,500 shares, nearly three times the count for the identical dollar figure. Then Palantir becomes the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2024, up more than 300 percent on the year, and runs to an all-time high above $200 in November 2025. A single year’s worth of those shares vesting into a $100 stock is worth north of half a million dollars.

Now, this good vs. bad timing depends on selling the moment shares vest. The vest-date price is when the shares are taxed, and your cost basis is set, but nothing forces you to cash out that day. Good and bad timing only lock in if you liquidate on the vest date. Hold instead, and the story can change. The bad-timing hire who kept those $8 shares rode them past $200 and turned a brutal grant into a great one. Selling at vest takes the company-timing bet off the table. Holding swaps it for a new one on your own clock, where any move after the vest date is a capital gain or loss rather than ordinary income.

The dollar figure in an equity offer is a snapshot of a company’s history. The real value gets set share by share, vesting date by vesting date, at a price nobody can promise you. Read the number as a starting point and nothing more.

An ISO example

Options work differently. Take a Series C company valued at $1 billion the year you join. Your offer includes ISOs with a stated value of $500,000. That number isn’t cash or a share count. The company divides it by the price per share from its last preferred round to land on how many options you get, a little over 16,500 in this case. A quarter of them vest after one year. Focus on just that first chunk of 4,143 shares.

An option is a right to buy, which means you need cash to exercise it. Your strike is set at the FMV of the common stock at the time of your grant, well below what investors paid for preferred stock. Here it’s $10. To actually own those 4,143 vested shares, you exercise them, writing a check for $41,430. That becomes your cost basis.

Exercising ISOs triggers no ordinary income tax, which sounds great. But the AMT calculates tax on the spread between your $10 strike and the FMV of the common stock on the day you exercise. That FMV isn’t in your hands. It rises as the company grows, driven by new funding rounds, internal financials, and independent 409A valuations, none of which you control or see in real time. What you do control is when you choose to exercise. Do it while the FMV is still close to your strike and the spread is small, so the AMT is too. Wait until the company has grown through several rounds and you could be staring at a large tax bill on paper gains you still can’t realize. This is why people who believe in a company exercise early and cheap.

Then the valuation climbs from $1 billion to $5 billion. Those 4,143 shares you spent $41,430 to buy are now worth somewhere around $625,000 on paper. Paper is the key word. Private shares convert to cash only at a liquidity event, such as an acquisition, an IPO or a tender offer in which the company lets employees sell a slice.

The tender offer occurs most often before an exit. But these can also happen around a new funding round, when an incoming investor or the company itself offers to buy back a portion of employees’ equity at a set price. The company decides when it happens, who qualifies, and how much each employee can sell, usually a percentage of your vested shares, often no more than 25 percent.

If you haven’t exercised yet when a tender opens, it can run as a cashless exercise, meaning you buy and sell in a single transaction. The sale proceeds cover your strike price and the tax, and you keep the difference, with no cash out of your own pocket. So instead of writing that $41,430 check and waiting, you exercise the slice the tender allows, let the proceeds pay the strike and the taxes on those shares, and walk away with some cash now while the rest keeps riding. Transaction fees will take a small bite out of what you net.

In sum, options require capital to exercise, can tax you before they pay you and only pay if the company grows and has a liquidity event. A bigger ceiling than an RSU, with more hoops to clear to get there.

How to value each one

For an option, ISO or NSO, the value today is the spread. Take the current fair market value, subtract your strike, multiply by your vested shares. At an early startup, the strike is usually set right at the current value, so that math comes out near zero on day one. All the value is the bet that the share price climbs above your strike and keeps going. If the company’s value falls below your strike, the option is underwater and worth nothing until it recovers.

For an RSU, the value is simpler. It’s just the share price multiplied by the number of units, since you paid nothing to get them. As long as the stock is worth anything, your RSUs are worth something.

RSUs are the lower-risk option: shares that hold value unless the company collapses entirely. Options are a type of leverage. If the company takes off, the gain on a low strike price can dwarf what an equivalent RSU grant would have paid. That risk profile is exactly why early-stage startups hand out options and mature companies lean on RSUs. The earlier and riskier the company, the more your upside is shaped like a call option, which is the whole point of joining early.

An ISO triggers no regular tax when you exercise, but the spread can trigger AMT, and holding long enough converts the gain to long-term capital gains. An NSO taxes the spread as ordinary income the moment you exercise, then capital gains on anything after. An RSU is ordinary income when it vests, or at the liquidity event if it’s a double-trigger grant, then capital gains after.

Pricing the equity means valuing the company

Knowing how your equity works doesn’t tell the whole story of its value. For that, you must assess whether the company can reach the valuation it’s already priced at.

The valuation in your offer only matters if the company can reach it or grow well past it. Your upside is the delta on the day you can actually sell. Everything in between depends on whether the company executes.

You won’t find that answer on the cap table or in the offer letter. It comes down to the people building the product. If the engineering talent is superior and the team can execute with steely focus, the valuation has substance and your equity is worth something. If the engineering can’t support it, your grant is a lottery ticket bound to come up worthless.

Next week I’ll cover how to assess a company's technical capabilities when you’re not an engineer yourself, and what that means about your equity's worth.

Most people read something like this, feel a little lost on the equity, and sign anyway. They tell themselves they’ll figure it out later. They don’t. That’s the gap Be More Earn More closes. Bring your real numbers, ask the questions you didn’t know to ask, and see how other people made the same government-to-tech move without leaving money on the table. $70 a month at formerfed.gumroad.com.

One caveat: none of this is tax or financial advice. Equity, options, and their tax treatment get complicated fast and depend on your specific situation. Before you act on anything or make a decision based on the numbers, talk to a CPA or financial advisor who can review your actual package.

What changed wasn’t their courage. Staying put was simply no longer an option.

Your fear might not vanish before you act. But it does become less of a barrier as you start taking action

Start taking action. Get access to FF Network.

People in this group usually have the necessary talent and work ethic. What’s missing is a process. There might be enough action. But not enough planning and strategy to give it a clear direction.

To start, you need to commit

Even if you’re not sure where you’ll work next or what you’ll do, committing to the experiment of leaving is necessary. This process always takes longer than expected. It will be impossible to weather the low points without commitment. Your career transition cannot be a weekend hobby. If you decide you’re not ready to work that hard, good. Then don’t do it and save yourself the heartache and confusion. The private sector isn’t for everyone, so there’s no need to shove a square peg in a round hole.

But if you are ready to commit, then read on.

Establish a target list

Stackrank ten to fifteen companies. Have a specific rationale for why each one is a fit for you.

Defense tech is a naturally adjacent sector, and there is more activity in it now than at any point in the last decade. Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI, Saronic, Helsing, Epirus, Hadrian, Castelion, True Anomaly and Shift5 are worth a look. Frontier AI is another area where operational experience translates, given the growing federal and military budgets. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and the major labs are worth considering, along with the applied AI companies built on top of them. Fintech, climate tech, autonomy outside of defense, biotech and the major cloud providers also hire people who can manage ambiguity and operate across stakeholders, which is most of what you have been doing for fifteen years.

Earlier-stage companies generally give you more network upside than the big names, because the alumni from a fast-growing Series B or C tend to scatter into interesting places over the following few years. The FAANG logos and the major defense primes have their place. The question is: what does each company do for your trajectory over the next five years?

Map your network against the list

Most formers underestimate the network they already have. Ten years inside means ten years of colleagues who have left, gone to industry, started companies, moved into VC, joined the primes, taken roles at the labs or built their own consultancies. Some of them are now at exactly the companies on your list. Others are one degree removed and will make an introduction if asked.

LinkedIn is the fastest way to find the best inroads. Pull up each company on your list, then sort through employees by first- and second-degree connections. Do the same for alumni who used to work there.

Don’t assume intros only come from close ties. Someone you worked with for six weeks on a TDY in 2014, who remembers you as sharp, will often work just as hard to refer you as a close friend. Reach out to everyone. You have nothing to lose when you’re just starting out.

Focus on two underused channels after completing your initial network mapping. Go through your own inbox and your phone history. Anyone who has reached out to you over the years about making a transition of their own is already inclined to take your call. Then look at the people who left your organization in the last three to five years. You probably know where most of them landed because office gossip travels. Pull up their LinkedIn profiles, see who is at a company on your target list, and reach out.

Run a pipeline

You need offers. To get offers, you need interview loops. To get loops, you need warm introductions to hiring managers and recruiters. Set a goal of five to seven conversations a week and accept that some weeks you will have three in one day and zero for the rest of the week. The average over a month is what you are managing toward.

Keep multiple efforts going at once. The company you are most excited about will slow down right when the one you were lukewarm on accelerates. The role that seemed like a perfect fit will turn out to be something different once you get inside the process. The hiring manager you connected with will leave suddenly, but offer you a role at their new company. You cannot predict which thread will produce an offer, so you keep pulling on each one.

An ask for every conversation

Formers tend to walk into networking conversations without a concrete request.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Do you have any advice?”

You’re outsourcing thinking to others, forcing them to come up with something meaningful on the spot. It’s almost painful for your interlocutor. This will be an unpleasant and unfruitful experience for the two of you. It’s a great way to never see this person again. They’re just going to feel guilty for not being helpful and won’t respond to follow-ups.

Discrete, tangible asks yield the best results. “I am targeting these five companies, do you know anyone at them who would take a call.” “I am weighing solutions architect roles versus BD roles, which do you think fits what you saw of my work.” “I have an interview at Company X next week, do you know anyone there who could give me a sense of what they are looking for.” Easy to answer. Easy to follow through on.

Start building interview anecdotes now

Ten to twenty stories you can talk about without any names or places that distract from the overall message. A crisis you managed. A team you led through ambiguity. A project that missed its deadline and how you handled the setback. A time you delivered hard news to a stakeholder. Use the STAR format: situation, task, action, result.

These anecdotes can answer more than one behavioral question. Interviewers are assessing whether you can think clearly under pressure, communicate well and be a good colleague. The specifics of where the story happened don’t matter.

Interview even when you are not sure

In the beginning, take every reasonable interview that comes your way. You get better at telling your story. By exploring roles that don’t seem perfect, you learn what you want and why. And being in active loops makes other recruiters move faster.

You will also start to trust your instincts. There will be a CEO who turns you off in a final round, and you will know to walk away. There will be a hiring manager you click with, even though the role is wrong; you will stay in touch, and the next role they hire for might be the one. None of that happens without reps.

You will not figure this out by thinking about it harder. Pick ten companies, open LinkedIn and find one person to message today.

I built FF Network for exactly the situation this post describes. A networking tool made for the fed-to-tech transition. Contacts, target companies, follow-ups and momentum in one place so the threads stop getting lost in spreadsheets and email chains.

Stop blaming yourself. Your system is broken.

Most aspiring former feds track the wrong metrics in the wrong way. You reach out when you think of someone. You follow up when you remember. You say whatever comes up in the moment.

This haphazard approach produces results if you already have a network. It falls apart when you don’t.

You’re Reaching Out to the Wrong People

You’re probably going after the impressive names on LinkedIn. Directors. VPs. Senior people at big companies. People who look like they have something to give you.

There are three archetypes worth talking to.

Trailblazers - The former colleagues who did what you’re doing now and landed where you want to be. A GS-13 who became a PM at one of the FAANGs. A contracting officer now in a BD role at a defensetech startup. They’ve proved the transition is possible. Their experience will inform your blueprint.

Connectors - These are people in the world you’re trying to enter. They might be in recruiting. They might manage a team. They might just know everyone. They don’t need to have done your transition. They need to know where the openings are and who’s hiring people like you. A single connector opens five doors otherwise closed or off your radar.

Reliable Recruiters - These are recruiters you’ve met along the way. For whatever reason, even when a role didn’t work out, you stayed in touch. Their insight is as valuable as it gets. Key perspectives on interview loops and offer negotiations. Ask for their advice and watch how it brings you to a whole new level.

Most feds reach out to the names with the titles. The executives. The ones who can’t help you because they don’t remember the transition, or maybe never even went through one. They don’t have time and they’re not hiring.

You’re networking with the wrong people.

Follow-Ups Into the Void

You schedule a call. It goes well. You say you’ll reach back out in a few days.

Then you get busy. A week passes. Two weeks. Three. You finally send something and now you’re the person who ghosted for a month and came looking for a favor.

This is more of a cold email masquerade than a follow-up.

In tech, or any career transition, speed matters. A thank-you within 24 hours says you focused. Waiting a week says you’re not serious.

Former feds are usually good at managing projects. You know how to track deadlines. But you apply that to deliverables, not relationships. You file the contact in your brain under “follow up eventually” and move on.

A system that prompts you to send thank-you notes, request updates and conclude conversations transforms your workflow. It enables you to scale your efforts, allowing you to monitor various touchpoints and interview cycles seamlessly. With this, nothing escapes your attention.

You Lack a Pitch

Most aspiring formerfeds won’t admit this. You think you can wing it. You’ve told this story a hundred times.

Except you haven’t in this context. Yes, you’ve covered your background and outlined the well-known companies you want to join. You probably talked about it for a good 10 minutes, when all you need is four sentences.

Where I’m coming from

What I plan to do next

Why I’m qualified

How I stand out from the crowd

Master these topics and you’re halfway there. You’ll be consistent and clear, proving you know what you want and don’t need anyone else to figure it out. Your interlocutors will know exactly how to help you.

Without this structure, you’ll come across as lost.

Solve the Problem

These three mistakes kill your career-transition momentum before you even get going.

You’re talking to the wrong people. You’re going silent at the wrong times. Your pitch suggests you’re still figuring it out. Five months later, you have no offers, zero interviews, and you’re thinking to just stay put in government

A solid, scalable system fixes this. You know which three types of contacts move the needle. You track interactions so follow-ups happen on time, not whenever you remember. You build a pitch and refine it every time.

You’ve got a strategy and the guessing days are behind you.

That’s the difference between spinning your wheels and moving.

FF Network handles all three. It sorts your contacts by type so you spend time on the right people. It reminds you when to follow up so you’re never silent. And it walks you through building a pitch that actually works. Check it out today. What do you have to lose?

A contact or your subject-matter expertise might have led to that first job. This won’t necessarily carry to the next. Different terms could easily decide the second move, and the third. What outcome you achieved. Who you impressed. These are the data points attracting the attention of recruiters and other executives.

Being fulfilled comes in many forms. It could be contentment with the day-to-day. A specific role. Living and working somewhere special. A base pay number. A massive annual bonus. Potentially life-transforming equity. Introspect to find out what matters to you. The list and priority order will change over time. What was right at the first move may not be what you want at the second. Or maybe you there are still a few outstanding goals and you can attain some of these in the next role.

Now as you are executing in that first role, remember: communication is underappreciated. Former feds undervalue it most of all. You shouldn’t. You’re better at it than nearly anyone you’ll work with.

You likely already know the value of polite persistence. After all, a lot of what you wanted to accomplish in government depended on getting people to do their jobs when they had no negative motivation, and on encouraging them to go faster, with a certain degree of customer satisfaction to consider. Our former colleagues got paid the same amount, no matter what, every two weeks. It’s only been recently that anyone in federal employ had to consider the possibility of losing their job, absent some grievances and repeated poor performance.

This meant you knew how to follow up with a clear articulation of what needed to be done and how you could help. Do the same thing on the outside. Plenty of your colleagues will assume things will get done just by waiting or showing up.

This is a road to perdition. And your opening.

Most of the people sitting around you never had to drive a project to completion through someone they couldn’t fire and who didn’t particularly want to be there. You did. This is a rare skill, which you must hone to your advantage.

Polite persistence is what lets you absorb a no and keep going. Free guide: When Rejection Happens, Line Up the Next Call →

But another worthy effort can arise when six months later you realize the role you landed probably isn’t where you want to be long-term, and you have to decide what to do about it.

I see it all the time. Someone spends 5, 10 or 15 years in federal service, decides they’re done, grinds through months of searching and lands at a consulting firm or a government-adjacent contractor doing risk management or compliance work. The job is fine. The pay is better. They’re relieved to be on the outside. And then they settle.

Not because they planned to. It’s just that they've already gone through the exhausting slog of looking for a job while working full-time, and the new role is comfortable enough that the urgency fades. Almost a year in, they know the job isn’t enough, but the idea of going through that process again while already employed feels like too much. So they tell themselves they’ll start looking again soon. They’ll wait until after the summer slowdown. They’ll wait until they have a year of private sector experience on their resume. They’ll wait until the right opportunity finds them.

Most of the beliefs that keep former feds in this holding pattern are things they picked up along the way and never examined. That you need to know exactly what you want before you start looking. Or that timing matters more than relationships.

There is no linear path from USG to tech. Things won’t fall apart if you stray from some predetermined path. These are hard beliefs to shed for people who spent years in bureaucracies where process and sequence mattered.

But think about what proximity actually gives you. If you’re in a consulting role supporting a tech company’s trust and safety team, you are closer to a job at that tech company than almost anyone applying through their careers page. You interact with their full-time employees every day. They know your work and whether you’re reliable under pressure. That relationship is worth more than a resume in a portal, and using it is completely normal. People in tech ask each other about jobs all the time. They set up coffee or a call to learn what it’s like to work somewhere, how someone got hired, whether the company is expanding a team. The person being asked almost always says yes to a call because they know there will come a time when they’re the one asking.

Former feds tend to resist this. There’s something about spending years in a security culture that makes it feel inappropriate to express interest in working somewhere else. Like it’s a boundary violation or disloyal. The private sector expects these conversations. After all, the first loyalty is to yourself. To your career. To your family’s financial future.

The same thing applies to the connections you already have outside your current job. A fellow alumnus who works at a company you’re interested in. Someone you met through a transition program who’s now at a defense tech firm. A recruiter you talked to eight months ago who was helpful, even though the role didn’t work out. These are viable paths into interview loops, and most people who left the government are sitting on three or four of them without treating any of them as active leads.

I landed one of my post-USG roles after a conversation with a hiring manager in late June. He told me they were going to pause the process for the summer and pick it back up in August, then pushed back our scheduled call by another week. I got the offer in late September. If I had waited for what seemed like the right time, or if I had interpreted the pause as a signal that I should back off, I would have missed it entirely.

A lot of former fed wait for permission without realizing they're letting opportunities pass them by. They’re following rules about professional behavior that were written for an environment they left behind. The plan is to end up somewhere better; the second search needs to start before the comfort of the first role makes it easy to postpone indefinitely.

If you're stuck in the holding pattern and want help building a plan for what's next, leave a comment or DM me. I support with former feds who are past the first move and ready to make the second one count.