Benefits of Having Clearance - VA.org (2024)

25 Feb Benefits of Having Clearance

The Various Advantages of Having a Clearance

Having a clearance, irrespective of its status has many advantages. No matter if you have an Active, Lapsed, or Inactive security clearance, let us have a look at various advantages.

The advantages of having an Active or Inactive personnel security clearance include:

• Having a clearance improves your marketability, especially withprivate civilian employer’s who are looking for ‘Cleared’ employees. Most of the times, they have both full-time and part-time positions open for individuals with a clearance.
• A large number of DoD contractors highly prefer hiring ex-military individuals that have a ‘Current’ clearance. The reason is that a lot of their jobs involve working at confidential facilities and information, which can only be accessed by a cleared personnel.
• A clearance will exponentially increase your chances of getting a job in specific sectors where non-cleared personnel’s cannot be hired. If you do have a clearance, there are hundreds and thousands of job opportunities available in the defense sector and government agencies.
• Getting a new clearance takes a lot of time and is also very expensive. If you already have a current clearance, the company doesn’t need to invest in your clearance, and this money goes to the hired employee.
• If you are transitioning from the military service, it is much easier to re-activate your clearance within 24 months without the need to start the entire application process from the beginning.
• It is generally recommended that you maintain the ‘Active’ status of your clearance, which can be done in many different ways. By working in military, companies with cleared positions, or government agencies, etc. It is generally lapsed when a person switches a job from military, or doesn’t work in the military for a continuous period of 2 years. If your clearance is still in the ‘Current’ status, make sure that you re-apply for it.

The advantages of having a lapsed clearance:

• It is challenging for the companies to find personnel with an ‘Active’ clearance. If they are unable to find them, they look for personnel that have a lapsed clearance. In such a case, the company pays for your clearance. Thus, you can see, having a lapsed clearance is also very advantageous when it comes to landing a job.
• If you had a clearance in the past, depending on the time at which you had your clearance, the complete investigation process of your re-application can take a lesser amount of time as compared to personnel’s who never had a clearance in the past.
• Companies give high preference to personnel’s who have a lapsed clearance as compared to hiring personnel’s who never had a clearance. As it takes less time to re-activate a clearance, the companies don’t need to wait as long asapplying for an entirely new clearance.

As you can see, having a clearance is full of advantages, and makes getting a job much easier. It is highly recommended that you have a ‘Current’ status clearance, but you still have the upper hand even if you have a lapsed clearance.

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