I’m sure this has been asked but I can’t find anything more current. I have held a TS/SCI, NSA poly, and worked in two SAPs. It has been several years since I last worked in a classified environment. I mainly worked in SIGINT, but also held a GS-13 civilian position in Infosec.
I am considering a move back into a classified job, but every job I am skill qualified for and interested in has a hard requirement that candidates must have an active TS/SCI. Some of the jobs have been open for a year or more, like some overseas positions.
My questions are, does it matter if I had lucrative clearances and program accesses in the past? Am I wasting my time applying for jobs that state active clearance is a must? What is the best path for people like me who have held a clearance, want to get back in and have no criminal history or negative marks since they were last active?
Just apply anyway. Nobody is going to arrest you, ban you from a job, or dish out any sort of punishment just because you apply for a job and you don’t have all of the qualifications they ask for. Let the recruiters actually reject you for not having the clearance. People have applied for “must have clearance” jobs before, even though they didn’t have the clearance, and were lucky enough to get sponsored. I can attest to this first-hand.
These gov contractors are a bit stupid. They don’t want to wait to clear someone, but yet their job postings stay active and unfilled for years because they can’t find candidates with active clearances. All the while they could have just sponsored a qualified candidate for a new clearance. It isn’t like the company will lose money because the money for clearance background checks comes from the government.
I second this. They are desperate for cleared workers. They can’t get them so they will take the next best thing, current (within 24 months) but inactive clearance.