How tough is it to get into the CIA or FBI for Information Technology?

Armymanis

Wondering how tough it is to get into the CIA or FBI for information Technology purposes? I was rejected from the army when I was a senior in high school and was told I could not enlist because of my various heart problems and milk allergies. Wanting to serve my country if one of those institutions will take me.

DatacomGuy

Armymanis wrote: »

Wondering how tough it is to get into the CIA or FBI for information Technology purposes? I was rejected from the army when I was a senior in high school and was told I could not enlist because of my various heart problems and milk allergies. Wanting to serve my country if one of those institutions will take me.

Tagging along. This would be a dream job for me. One of my dream careers would be forensics for one of the big agencies. FBI, CIA, SS, etc.

12334

DatacomGuy wrote: »

Tagging along. This would be a dream job for me. One of my dream careers would be forensics for one of the big agencies. FBI, CIA, SS, etc.

Why not DOD? I got rejected for my eyes trying to join the NAVY. Worked as a contractor for USMC years later and now DOD at the Pentagon. Also worked for DHS which was awesome. I am far from a saint and both entities took me. What sort of ITwork do you want to do? I have a Top Secret which allows me to do nearly everything. I really want to do forensics or hacking but I am afraid to fail a poly and then damage what I have already.

Neat site for this is: FederalSoup.com

shodown

It depends on what you are looking to do. Most of the techy jobs are done by a contractor force. Next you have to find a way to get a clearance. This will prove difficult as we have moved out of the war time economy and there aren't as many positions open as it use to be. The usual easiest way to get a clearance is through the military, 2nd was coming right out of college in the right areas(DMV). IT jobs in DOD/Intell agencies aint really serving your country, its mostly about the dollar. Ive worked at a few of them in my lifetime and no matter which one it was operations was determined by how much the particular agencies were willing to pay the contractors. If you are really looking into serving the country I would look into a lot of the non profits.

2nd part of this was just my opinion, but I don't want you to end up Disappointed. I did the whole serve my country thing and it left a disgusting taste in my mouth, then i learned to see it for what it is and its a lot of people like us who see what its really about.

12334

shodown wrote: »

It depends on what you are looking to do. Most of the techy jobs are done by a contractor force. Next you have to find a way to get a clearance. This will prove difficult as we have moved out of the war time economy and there aren't as many positions open as it use to be. The usual easiest way to get a clearance is through the military, 2nd was coming right out of college in the right areas(DMV). IT jobs in DOD/Intell agencies aint really serving your country, its mostly about the dollar. Ive worked at a few of them in my lifetime and no matter which one it was operations was determined by how much the particular agencies were willing to pay the contractors. If you are really looking into serving the country I would look into a lot of the non profits.

2nd part of this was just my opinion, but I don't want you to end up Disappointed. I did the whole serve my country thing and it left a disgusting taste in my mouth, then i learned to see it for what it is and its a lot of people like us who see what its really about.

Your post expands on mine in that alot of the IT work is done by the contractor work force. There are times when Civilian opportunities presents themselves but I don't really have much interest in that since I don't like to be tied down. One of the nice things so far has been that the clearance adjudicators don't seem to care about job hopping since you are a contractor. Even though the pay is good and benefits are good sometimes the pay isn't great.

In terms of serving the country I want to perform forensics or hack against select enemies of the State. I like what DHS/ICE does for example. I don't agree with everything that government does so I don't work for an organization that I don't believe in like Health and Human Services Department of Children and Families.

There are some pretty cool non profits out there as mentioned if that is a direction you wish to proceed with. The same applies for non-profit groups if you don't ethically agree with what they do. Just don't work there.

Finally I didn't know this about clearances. I think that some of this might depend on what locality you reside in. Alot of contractors hold clearances in the DC area but that is probably since there are alot of IT jobs.

I wonder if there are still fewer clearances being issued locally too and I am just unable to notice due to the huge amount of IT jobs here. Hard to tell in the DMV.


That is my take.

Armymanis

I mostly want to deal with servers and networks. I would like to manage servers and make sure all the data is secure and that the networks are solid and protected. I thought about staying in the user support side of IT for awhile just to gain experience. I am hoping to reach this goal before I am 80. So I guess you would say security, but I thought that was really hard to get into. My backup plan is the user side of IT.

12334

Armymanis wrote: »

I mostly want to deal with servers and networks. I would like to manage servers and make sure all the data is secure and that the networks are solid and protected. I thought about staying in the user support side of IT for awhile just to gain experience. I am hoping to reach this goal before I am 80. So I guess you would say security, but I thought that was really hard to get into. My backup plan is the user side of IT.

I would imagine that even if you were doing end user support, you would need a clearance. I did work a DOD position that did not require a clearance. It was application related.

The biggest thing is your credit and foreign ties followed by criminal history. That is my best guess based upon what I can see. Whether or not you were denied entry into the military due to health reasons is probably irrelevant.

If I were you, I would query "clearance" "eligible" in my job searches if you have no major issues with the above.

I am on the client side but I work in the back office and don't have to deal with users anymore and hope to never have to again unless things go sour (and they often have). The client side can pay as well as the server side/desktop side these days. The days of the client side being exclusively entry level are over. I am glad no one felt that I was "good enough" to get a straight server role/network role over the past 13 years. I bet if you look at quite a few IT professionals, you would find that if we were honest in what we wanted to do it would be to tinker or hack. Tinkering didn't pay well for the longest and had a strange entry level stigma associated with it even though I still think my most technically challenging days were at the helpdesk.

I wouldn't worry about age too much, at this rate I will be working until I am 80. Hopefully it is still behind a desk and not with power cords under a desk.

DatacomGuy

12334 wrote: »

Why not DOD? I got rejected for my eyes trying to join the NAVY. Worked as a contractor for USMC years later and now DOD at the Pentagon. Also worked for DHS which was awesome. I am far from a saint and both entities took me. What sort of ITwork do you want to do? I have a Top Secret which allows me to do nearly everything. I really want to do forensics or hacking but I am afraid to fail a poly and then damage what I have already.

Neat site for this is: FederalSoup.com

Interesting. I'm also not necessarily a saint either, although no criminal history I have done a fair amount of drugs and a horrible driving record when I was younger, which is what has stopped me from pursuing gigs with federal agencies.

Are DOD gigs federal jobs or contractor?