Three job markets open up the day you separate. One schedule decides how much of them you reach. Here is the whole transition, in order.
Every transition brief covers the same ground. Update your resume. Go to the job fair. Use your benefits.
What they skip is the order. The federal job you apply for in your last few months needs paperwork your command has to write first. The training program worth six months of your pay closes at exactly 180 days out. And three separate job markets are open to you at once, each one hiring and paying its own way.
Right now you have time. Later you won't. So here is the schedule I give separating service members, starting a year out. Then the two things that decide whether your applications land: what veterans' preference really does, and which hiring paths belong to you.
They pay differently. They hire for different work. They are not equally stable. The figures below are the ranges I see in the market. Locality, clearance level and the contract itself move all of them.
Pay tops out around $197,200. The average federal employee makes about $112,000. Most people start at GS-9 — about $70,623 — or lower, and 70% of feds sit below GS-13. GS-13 through GS-15 are often supervisors. The benefits are strong and the work is much steadier than contracting. The jobs are generalist: project management, customer service, public policy, investigations, HR, finance, security and IT.
Companies like GDIT, CACI, Leidos and Booz Allen Hamilton. Entry and mid-level pay beats the federal version. Figure around $132,000 on average with a TS/SCI, around $160,000 with a polygraph, and a ceiling near $200,000. The trade is stability. Contracts re-compete about every five years. Here your clearance and your certs are the currency. The jobs are specialized, not generalist, along the lines of Linux systems engineer and systems administrator. They get posted on clearancejobs.com.
Large companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, SpaceX and Salesforce. This is the highest ceiling of the three: $300,000 to $1M and up. Pay comes as base salary plus bonus plus stock, not salary alone. Some employers around the DMV pay a clearance bonus, including Microsoft, AWS, Google and Workday. These jobs exist to move revenue: account executive, solutions architect, customer success, forward deployed engineer. Look up the pay on Blind and Levels.fyi.
None of this is applying yet. It is all groundwork. It is also the window most people skip, which is how they end up 90 days out with no accounts, no resume and no certs.
This is where you finish your credentials. It is also where the biggest opportunity of the whole transition opens and closes.
Applications start here. They start before you have a DD-214, which surprises almost everybody.
Your DD-214 shows up and the search keeps going. It does not restart.
Here is the part almost nobody hears in time. Preference improves where you stand. It does not hand you a job, and it does not qualify you for one. You still have to meet the announcement's experience and education requirements like everybody else. Preference works after that, on the ranking.
Five-point preference. For most honorably discharged veterans who served in a war period or a qualifying campaign. No disability involved.
Ten-point preference. For any service-connected disability rated by the VA, a 0% rating included, or for a Purple Heart. There is also a 0-point sole survivor status, which gives you preference but no points.
The points under category rating. Most federal jobs get filled by sorting applicants into groups: Best Qualified, Well Qualified, Qualified. No math involved. In that system preference moves your placement, not your score. A veteran with a 10% or higher rating goes to the top of the highest group. A veteran below 10% goes above the non-veterans inside whatever group they land in.
The announcements it applies to. Preference only counts on jobs open to the public. It does not apply to internal merit promotion, transfers or reassignments. That is why a veteran with real preference sees nothing change on half the jobs they apply to.
The documents that prove it. A DD-214 for every veteran. For 10-point preference, add the SF-15 and a VA disability letter. The VA letter downloads from VA.gov in a couple of minutes. The SF-15 is a form worth filling out on a quiet afternoon, not the night an application closes.
One exception. Retired officers at O-4 and above usually don't get preference unless they are disabled veterans.
Preference is one thing. A hiring authority is another. An authority lets an agency hire you outside the normal competitive process, and several exist just for veterans. VRA covers entry and mid-level roles. The 30% or more disabled veteran authority covers any grade at all. VEOA lets you apply to jobs otherwise open only to current federal employees. Schedule A is not veteran-specific, but it fits a lot of people who served. And two public directories, the Veteran Employment Program Offices and the Selective Placement Program Coordinators, are how jobs get filled without ever being posted.
Each one has its own rules, its own paperwork and its own quirks. They all live in one place: federal hiring authorities explained. One read tells you which ones are yours. Every authority you claim is another shot at the same job.
A clearance you held on active duty does not vanish the day you separate. It stays usable for about two years if it goes unused. So a contractor posting that asks for an "active clearance" is not the wall it looks like. What active, current and eligible really mean, and what a new employer has to do to pick yours back up, are covered in is your clearance still active.
The schedule is the part of this page worth keeping. Almost every transition problem I see is really a timing problem in disguise. The SkillBridge window that closed. The statement of service nobody mentioned. The cert that takes three months, started with three weeks left.
For the federal side in full detail, the free USAJOBS Playbook walks it step by step: reading an announcement, the two-page resume, the questionnaire, the documents, every authority. If cleared contractor work is the target instead, the free Security Clearance Playbook covers how to get sponsored. And if you want to know who is writing this, that is my story: helpdesk to GS-14, no veteran status, no connections, just the rulebook.
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