Margarita Howard’s HX5 Converts Military Skills to Contracts
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Service members often leave the military with sharp technical skills but thin civilian resumes. HX5, led by CEO Margarita Howard, has built part of its hiring strategy around closing that specific gap between military expertise and civilian job requirements.
The company works across research and development, engineering, information technology, and mission operations for the Department of Defense and NASA. Much of that work touches advanced weapons research, production readiness reviews for sensor systems, and modeling and simulation for defense and space programs, tasks that often build directly on skills troops used while still in uniform.
“The work we do is very exciting. Some of it is not being done anywhere else in the world,” Margarita Howard says, noting that meaningful assignments often matter as much to veteran employees as compensation does.
TRANSLATING UNIFORMED EXPERIENCE
An engineer who once served in the Air Force, for example, might join HX5 to support systems similar to those from military service, only now viewed from the contractor’s side of the table. That continuity lets veterans apply specialized training while learning how contractors interact with government customers day to day and project to project.
Howard has said she looks specifically for candidates with prior Department of Defense or NASA experience because that background is different from commercial sector work. Employees who already understand agency missions and procurement expectations tend to adjust faster than those arriving without it.
HX5’s participation in the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship Program reinforces this pattern. Fellows spend twelve weeks split between hands-on project work and professional development sessions covering project management and communication skills, areas the military does not always emphasize.
Since 2021, eight fellows have passed through HX5 under Margarita Howard’s leadership, each one arriving with technical grounding the company can put to immediate use. Refer to this article for related information.
More about Howard on https://www.f6s.com/member/margarita-howard