News + Career Advice
Stay current on security-cleared job search tips, trends, and news.
Which Jobs Actually Require a Secret Clearance – and Which Ones Only Say They Do
On October 1, 2017, 1,198,684 people held eligibility for access to classified information and were in access to nothing at all. No document, no program, no compartment. They were 29.7 percent of the 4,030,625 individuals ODNI counted as eligible that year, and it is the most rec… more
Imminent Danger Pay, Hardship, and Post Differential: How OCONUS Cleared Pay Is Built
Congress capped imminent danger pay at $225 a month. Not $225 a day, not a percentage of salary, and not negotiable. 37 U.S.C. 310 fixes the ceiling, the services accrue it at $7.50 for each day in a designated area, and a full year maxes at $2,700. Most people searching "imminen… more
What DCSA Actually Does: The Agency That Decides Whether Your New Hire Can Start
High-risk federal vetting cases closed in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 averaged 220 days start to finish. Twelve of those days were intake. Forty belonged to the adjudicator. The remaining 168, better than three-quarters of the total, were the background investigation itself… more
What Private Security Contractors Actually Make: The OCONUS Pay Bands Nobody Publishes
From August 2008 to April 2025 the Pentagon published a quarterly census of the contractors working for the Defense Department in the U.S. Central Command theater. The final edition counted 20,356 of them, 6,301 in Iraq and Syria. It also contained this sentence. "The Department … more
CI vs. Full-Scope Polygraph: Which Programs Require Which, and What Each One Asks
The Defense Department retired the phrase "full scope polygraph" in writing. Its polygraph instruction defines the exam readers mean, then adds five words in the glossary: "Previously known as full-scope polygraph." The government-wide directive did the same. Energy's rulebook ne… more