Mid-Career Moves Can Mean Change of Pace

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By Daniel Jackson
Roll Call Staff

Chris Carlson stood six blocks away from the World Trade Center when he saw people jumping from the collapsing towers. He turned and left, not wanting to watch anymore. By the time Carlson reached his apartment, he was blackened with soot from the plume of dust that had spread over lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.

After the experience, Carlson told his bosses at Sapient that he wanted to move to Washington, D.C., to “create change in the government.” Not wanting to lose Carlson, Sapient struck a deal with him: Carlson would transfer to the company’s Washington office, where he would work on contracts with government agencies. His first work was with the intelligence community; he would later take the Department of Defense on as a client. He currently is managing a project for the Library of Congress with the aim of creating a “new experience” for visitors.

Carlson never changed companies, but his switch in client types — he mostly had worked with private telecom companies such as Lucient and Cintelco while in New York — exposed him to a new culture and way of doing business in Washington that he said illustrates the challenges faced by those who move from public service to the private world, or vice versa. “If you’re a GS-13 or GS-14 who’s been in government your whole life, and you go into the commercial sector, it’s going to be tough,” Carlson said. “It’s going to be much faster-paced.”

This doesn’t mean that government workers are less skilled or intelligent, he added, but that they have a different skill set, one that people who come to Washington from a purely commercial background — like Carlson — have to acquire. “When I came in to do government work, my thing was to learn how to deal with working in a bureaucracy,” he said.

Heading to K Street

Gregg Hartley, the vice president and COO of Washington lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates, works in an industry often associated in the public mind with the “revolving door,” in which former Members of Congress and Hill staffers return to lobby their former colleagues or bosses on behalf of various interests. Hartley himself made the jump in 2003, leaving his longtime post as senior aide to then-House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) to work for Cassidy. Hartley said the increasing scrutiny of the lobbying industry in recent years actually has encouraged more Hill staffers — particularly younger ones — to become lobbyists. “They think that, if there’s so much discussion about it, it must be a really cushy job,” he said. “Some [of them] have a warped perspective.” Hartley added that once he started at Cassidy, he had to make use of skills that he hadn’t used much since becoming a Congressional staffer. “I had to rely on skill sets that I had not used recently,” he said. “I was more fortunate than some in having become a staffer later in my career; I had experience with management in private firms and meeting a payroll. Some people go straight from college to the Hill, so they don’t have [that experience].”

Hartley said Congressional staffers thinking about going into lobbying should check with the ethics rules early in the process and should give some thought to what kind of lobbying job they want. “If you want to go into the advocacy business, do you want to join a K Street firm?” Hartley said. “Do you want to work for a trade association, or possibly do in-house lobbying?”

He added that some Congressional staffers — particularly Democrats — are increasingly going to work as lobbyists for nonprofit organizations. “Right now you’re seeing high-quality policy people who are Democrats going that route,” Hartley said.

Avoid Pigeon-Holing Yourself

Relationships with lawmakers and security clearances can be huge assets to government workers ready to transition to work in the private sector, said Tom Morris, whose firm, Morris and Associates, offers career transition counseling. But people who have spent a career in government sometimes have a tendency to overly limit themselves when they do a job search. “People see themselves as only capable of doing what they have been doing,” Morris said. “They often don’t see their abilities as broad enough or transferable enough.”

They also sometimes struggle to articulate exactly kind of work they want to do, instead coming with a laundry list of work they want to avoid. “I’ll ask them what they want to do, and they’ll say, ‘This is what I don’t want to do,’” Morris said.

Morris advises people leaving the government to list security clearances and language skills at the top of their résumés, even if they won’t be using them in their new jobs, because a clearance means that a job candidate already has been “checked out” and deemed trustworthy, while language skills often mark a job candidate as intelligent or intellectually curious. Morris said one recruiter he met with keeps a “special file” with résumés of people with language skills because “when you need them, they’re hard to find.” Résumés should be specifically tailored to the job a candidate wants, Morris said, not necessarily a “representative history of the person’s entire life.” While they must be truthful, résumés should emphasize experience relating to the desired position — even if it is on a volunteer basis.

Current demographics are making it easier for government workers over 50 to find jobs in the private sector, Morris said; because of the drop in birth rates following the baby boom, there is a “dearth of people in their 30s and 40s,” meaning increased opportunities for the baby boomer crowd. Overall, Morris said, people ready to do a thorough job search don’t need to worry. “Most people from federal service who do a serious search are successful in finding a fulfilling job,” he said.