Jamie Jones Miller got her first security clearance at 19, as an intern in the J2 at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She calls it her “golden ticket.” It has been the through line of a career that took her from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon and now to Northeastern University.
On this episode of Security Clearance Insecurity on Federal News Network, Miller talks about a problem she sees across national security hiring: “The pool is the pool is the pool.” Government and industry compete for the same limited group of cleared professionals, while mission-critical roles go unfilled.
Her answer is to build the pool earlier. At Northeastern, students can do a co-op at the Kostas Research Institute, the university’s applied R&D arm. There the university sponsors them for personnel clearances and can help them become facility security officers. Students can then do a co-op with an industry partner, help that company set up its security program and get hired when they graduate. Miller also wants students to know the mission needs more than analysts and engineers. “We need accountants who are cleared,” she said.
Scaling that model is hard. A university needs a reason to hold a clearance, a facility clearance and the infrastructure to protect classified work. Northeastern often advises companies that are building their own programs.
As a member of the ClearanceJobs Policy Advisory Board, Miller also wants to bring back cleared people who are sitting on the sidelines, which means fixing reciprocity and eligibility timelines. She sees progress. Colleagues who recently went through the process praised how much visibility they had into their cases.
Looking ahead, she stressed “human centrality in the age of AI,” which means keeping critical thinking and judgment at the center of intelligence work.
Miller will speak at ClearanceJobs Connect Reston, October 15–16 at the Carahsoft office in Reston, Virginia. Register today and we’ll see you next week!
