Today we have an insightful guest post from Ansel Stein
One of the hardest questions when leaving government is also one of the most basic:
What should I search for?
If you were an intelligence analyst, you search for intelligence jobs. If you worked in diplomacy, you look at government affairs. If you were a security officer, you search corporate security. If you managed programs, you look for program manager positions.
That makes sense. It may also cause you to miss some of the best opportunities available to you.
I’ve been thinking about this while starting to build Acacia Talent Partners with a former colleague. We’re trying to help people from the intelligence, military, diplomatic, law-enforcement, and broader government communities make the transition into commercial careers.
As part of that work, I’ve started collecting job postings and looking at them a little differently. Rather than asking whether the title sounds like a government job, I’m asking:
What does this company actually need someone to do, and where might someone have learned to do that?
The answers have surprised me.
Consider a job I recently found at Hershey: Manager, M&A Competitive Intelligence & Strategic Projects.
A government intelligence analyst might see “M&A,” assume they lack the requisite background, and keep scrolling.
And they might be right. Hershey wants real commercial and financial fluency.
But look at the work underneath the title. The company wants someone who can take ambiguous strategic questions, structure research and analysis, assess competitors and markets, challenge assumptions, develop scenarios, synthesize different streams of information, and turn that work into recommendations for senior leaders.
That should sound familiar to a lot of people who have worked in intelligence.
Or consider Head of Operations, Global Affairs at Electronic Arts.
EA is looking for someone to help run a roughly 200-person organization spanning Legal, Government Affairs, Procurement, Business Development, and Corporate Development. The work includes budgets, talent planning, technology adoption, AI initiatives, vendors, organizational processes, and major cross-functional projects.
A former senior government official may never think to search for that job.
But someone who has run an embassy, headquarters element, large program, interagency effort, or complex mission has probably dealt with people, money, technology, competing priorities, senior stakeholders, and organizational change.
The title is different.
Some of the problems aren’t.
This is the shift I’ve started encouraging people to make.
Instead of asking:
What private-sector job corresponds to my government job?
Ask:
What problems did people repeatedly trust me to solve?
Those are very different questions.
Your government title is partly a product of the institution that employed you. It makes sense inside that institution because everyone understands the organizational structure, authorities, mission, and vocabulary around it.
A commercial employer doesn’t have that context.
They have problems.
They need someone who can make sense of incomplete information. Build a program from scratch. Brief an executive. Manage a crisis. Understand a difficult customer. Navigate a bureaucracy. Evaluate risk. Coordinate people who don’t report to each other. Protect a senior principal. Figure out why a technology isn’t being adopted. Turn an ambiguous question into something an organization can actually act on.
Those capabilities can appear under titles you would never think to search.
Some commercial employers make the translation relatively easy.
Amazon recently advertised for an Intelligence Analyst, Global Security Intelligence. The work includes OSINT, threat analysis, intelligence production, briefing, customer requirements, and collection. Amazon explicitly identifies intelligence and military analytic experience as relevant.
PsiQuantum is looking for a Senior Director, U.S. National Security Partnerships who understands the Intelligence Community and defense ecosystem, requirements, acquisition, budgeting, emerging technology, and how government turns capabilities into programs.
Those transitions don’t require much imagination.
Others do.
Anthropic’s Executive Services Program Manager, for example, isn’t called an intelligence or national-security job. Yet the company specifically identifies experience in intelligence analysis, threat assessment, investigations, executive protection, or security operations as useful.
The trick is learning to recognize your capabilities when they appear in someone else’s vocabulary.
There is an important caveat here.
Translation is not the same thing as qualification.
Just because you spent ten years analyzing geopolitical developments doesn’t mean you’re qualified to do M&A strategy at Hershey.
And being a government analyst doesn’t qualify you for a Director of Procurement Intelligence role requiring machine learning, statistical modeling, supply-chain expertise, and enterprise data platforms.
Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
What I think matters is the combination of capabilities you bring.
Maybe you’re:
Intelligence + finance
National security + emerging technology
Security + program building
Government leadership + enterprise operations
Intelligence + AI/data
Diplomacy + client engagement
Your government experience may give you judgment, tradecraft, domain expertise, leadership, or an ability to operate under uncertainty.
Your second capability may be what makes that experience commercially valuable.
This also changes how you tell your story.
“I spent 15 years in the Intelligence Community” tells an employer where you’ve been.
“I spent 15 years helping senior leaders make decisions with incomplete information, and I’ve spent the last three building and deploying AI-enabled tools that improve that process” tells them something about what you can do for them.
That’s a very different proposition.
If you’re thinking about leaving government, or you’ve already left and are struggling to figure out where you fit, try this exercise.
Put your résumé aside for a few minutes.
Write down the five hardest problems people repeatedly trusted you to solve.
Not your responsibilities. Not your billets. Not your job titles.
Problems.
Then ask yourself:
What capabilities did those problems require?
Which of those capabilities would matter outside government?
What’s my second capability?
What commercial organizations have similar problems?
What am I missing to be credible there?
That last question is important.
Sometimes you’ll discover that the gap is mostly vocabulary. You already know how to do the work, but you aren’t describing it in a way the employer recognizes.
Sometimes the gap is experience. You understand the problem but haven’t solved it in a commercial environment.
And sometimes you’ll discover that you’re simply not qualified for the job.
That’s useful information too.
This is one of the ideas we’re exploring through Acacia.
Most résumés tell you where someone worked and what positions they held.
We’re interested in what sits underneath that: what problems they’ve solved, what capabilities they’ve developed, what environments they’ve operated in, and where those things might create value next.
That requires looking differently at jobs too.
The goal isn’t to convince employers that every former intelligence officer, diplomat, military officer, or federal employee can do anything.
It’s to make the genuine connections visible.
So if you’re looking at the private sector and can’t quite figure out where you belong, I’d start with a different question.
Don’t ask:
What’s the commercial equivalent of my government job?
There may not be one.
Ask:
What problems have I learned to solve, who has those problems now, and what else do I need to know to solve them there?
Then start searching from there.
I’m continuing to explore these questions through Acacia Talent Partners, particularly how people coming out of government can better understand and communicate the value of what they’ve learned to do.
If you’re making that transition, have made it successfully, or hire people from government and have a perspective on what translates well (and what doesn’t), I’d be glad to compare notes.
You can reach me at ansel@acaciatalent.com
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