I’ve seen an uptick in individuals asking about provisional clearances and how long a provisional clearance will be in affect. When it comes to clearance questions, the terms are often confusing – even to those who have been drinking from the firehose of clearance information for over a decade. So it’s no surprise that many applicants have questions about the clearance process and what their current status is or means.
A provisional clearance most likely applies to individuals who may have obtained an interim security clearance while they wait final eligibility, or those granted a conditional clearance as they work though issues that need to be mitigated before a final determination can be made. They confer different meanings, but in many ways the experience of having one will be the same for an applicant – assuming you don’t have any skeletons in your closet and you keep your path on the straight and narrow.
The path to conditional clearance eligibility arrived in a June update to the National Adjudicative Guidelines for Security Clearances. But it hasn’t really been until the past year that the Department of Defense appears to be taking the issuance of conditional clearances seriously. Conditional clearances grant eligibility to access classified information so you can get your job done – but with conditions that need to be met, perhaps financial payment milestones or passing a drug test within a certain timeframe.
Assuming the conditions are met, then the final clearance is granted. Conditional clearances require more work on the part of the government or sponsoring agency to track the individual’s status and adherence to the conditions – which may be a part of why they’ve rarely been used. But with demand for certain skillsets high, and the cleared pipeline remaining a challenge, it’s no wonder conditional clearances are seeing more use.
Very different than a conditional clearance but sometimes conflated with the term, like provisional, is an interim security clearance. An interim security clearance can be granted by certain agencies when individuals have passed basic cursory parts of the initial background investigation, such as record checks and a fingerprint scan. As the final background investigation is conducted, interim eligibility allows individuals at a low risk or with minimal issues to get to work – often in as little as a few weeks.
