So I have my clearance and a job, and another company is looking to employ me. The catch is… in my contract for my current job, I have to stay for a minimum of 6 months or I don’t get to keep my clearance pretty much. Do you think the job looking to employ me would wait (5 months now) for me to get out of my contract? Or would they pay for my clearance for me to get out?
This doesn’t make any sense to me.
Your clearance does not belong to the company. You might have to repay something if you don’t work for them six months, but then your gaining company might pay that fee for you.
But there are things that the company could do to mess up the transfer, aren’t there? I read a lot of stories about people who leave under seemingly good terms only to find that the company makes some bad statements later.
Maybe you are on an interim rather than a full clearance? If you are still on an interim, my understanding is your full investigation will go to the bottom of the pile when you change jobs because the losing employer will cancel the investigation and the gaining employer needs to request a “new” investigation. If you have a full clearance, your new employer simply requests it be “transferred” to them. You current employer does not own your clearance.
They cannot legally do anything to mess this up. If you leave on good terms and give them proper notice, etc., I cannot believe they will risk their own reputation as a government contract company by lying about it. However, if you are considering leaving with less than 6 months on the job, perhaps things are not all that wonderful between you and some in the organization which they might use against you, I suppose. Still, they can’t enter an incident against your clearance simply because you leave regardless of how short or long your employment tenure was with them.
Leaving a position requiring a security clearance before the investigation is completed normally causes the investigation discontinuation. The Subject and gaining employer need to let the investigating Agency know that the investigation is still needed. We don’t waste much time on discontinued cases.
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Physical security contracting companies used to strongly threaten that if you left the job before your one-year contract was up, you would be blacklisted from that industry. The contract had no penalties written in, not even having to pay back training costs. And those threats were so empty that folks were easily able to move from one contract/ location, to a separate contract/ location within the same company with zero repercussions. I’m not sure about other industries like IT or Linguistics.