In the film Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character is a business consultant whose job keeps him traveling 300 days per year. Over the course of his career, he’s clocked up quite large number of frequent flyer miles, and built a philosophy of living around the art of packing light. “Moving is living,” he says. “Some animals were meant to carry each other, to live symbiotically for a lifetime—star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not those animals. The slower we move, the faster we die. We are not swans. We’re sharks.”
There’s something incredibly tempting about living life as a rolling stone, and having contrails between airports form the backbone of your world. For some—maybe even you—this need not be a fantasy lived out only by characters on the silver screen. If you hold a security clearance, there’s a good chance you’ve done some traveling in your day, whether as a soldier, spy, consultant, or Foreign Service officer. If you’d like to put that clearance and experience to good use, here are four types of jobs that often advertise travel requirements of 75% or greater—more than enough to keep you on the road or in the air.
Computer Networking
The work necessary to keep any form of infrastructure running smoothly is often overlooked. Our highways are only as good as the funding that goes toward repair. For every stretch of open road where it’s safe to put the hammer down and break 90, there are construction workers toiling during off-traffic hours to keep potholes from destroying your suspension or flipping your car. Likewise, computer network infrastructure isn’t something that just works. The spaghetti-work of wires, routers, switches, and servers that make up our intranets and wide area networks require constant care and feeding. That’s where network technicians come in.
NCI Information Systems, Inc. is hiring an on-call local area network technician responsible for auditing, planning, and installing networks and network devices at geographically dispersed offices of the Defense Health Agency. Part of the job is modernization. Like the cracks and holes that form on busy highways, networks are dynamic structures constantly being upgraded, repaired, and optimized. (Fast computers are of little benefit on a slow network.) Because networks know no geographic limit, the job calls for CONUS and OCONUS work. Wherever there are soldiers in need of medical care, there are medical staffs in need of ways to access and update electronic patient records. Your job will be to keep the system running.
Special Operations Support
Right up front, I’ll note that this posting for a satellite subject matter expert doesn’t specify whether or not this job is conducted in space. You will be working with satellites, though, so I wouldn’t entirely rule out earning your astronaut wings (which are an actual set of wings you can earn in the Army, and sure to quiet down even the noisiest paratrooper at your party). What this job does specify is the type of work you’ll be doing. RLM Communications, Inc. needs someone to deploy overseas and work remotely or embedded as the subject matter expert for the SOFTACS program. SOFTACS is short for Special Operations Forces Tactical Assured Connectivity System. If you’re interested in the job, you hopefully know what that is, but for everyone else, SOFTACS is an integrated digital communications system. In short, it can use military and commercial satellites for the transmission of voice, video teleconferencing, data, and images. Obviously, this job calls for a TS/SCI clearance.
Sales
Traveling sales representatives are perhaps the most famous road warriors in the business world. Things have improved markedly since Willy Loman suffered a pay cut and eventual firing in Death of a Salesman. BIAS Corporation is hiring a PeopleSoft solutions architect responsible for working with clients to identify their human resources and payroll needs, and to build a package that solves all of their problems. This includes working with sales representatives from places such as Oracle to get a server software infrastructure up and running; building pricing and project estimates; and drawing up a roadmap to make the sale and install the service.
Security
Many clearance holders first got their security screening as part of a job that required protecting America from hostile actors. That’s a huge responsibility, and one not easily relinquished. If you want to get back in the business of protecting the U.S., there are thousands of postings here at ClearanceJobs that don’t necessarily require a uniform or oath of enlistment.
TASC, Inc. is hiring someone to harden the homeland against threats foreign and domestic. If you fill the test engineer position, you will be responsible for testing the security equipment and procedures that protect the nation’s transportation infrastructure, which ranges from boats and planes to trains and busses. According to the posting, the job’s 100% travel requirement will have you gone for up to two months at a time. Even when you’re not traveling, you’ll be doing fieldwork at airports and other such terminals, analyzing the processes and hardware in such places as baggage handling and checkpoints. That is exactly the kind of job that needs a good shark at the helm.
