Politics & Government

"BRAC Jobs 101" Examines Area Employment Prospects

Meeting shows high interest in Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) jobs. About 5,800 jobs will be added to Fort Meade by the end of this fall. Tuesday agencies and contractors held a session to discuss potential new jobs coming from expansion at the Army

Scores of job seekers crowded the Arundel High School auditorium Tuesday to hear about the thousands of potential new jobs coming to the area due to expansion at Fort Meade.

Officials from Fort Meade agencies and related contractors offered tips on how to land work as a result of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) activities. The "BRAC Jobs 101" session was sponsored by the Anne Arundel County Workforce Development Corporation and the Howard County Office of Workforce Development. 

About 5,800 jobs will be added to Fort Meade by the end of this fall thanks to the relocation of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Defense Media activities and the co-location of the Defense Adjudication initiatives.

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Thousands more are expected to be added due to expansion at the National Security Agency (NSA), U.S. Cyber Command and other agencies on base.

"This totally improves our economic backbone, our social fabric," said Robert Leib, the special assistant for BRAC in Anne Arundel County. "It means great things for our region."

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Companies on hand recruiting new workers included Wilhem Commercial Builders, an Annapolis Junction-based company that specializes in construction of secure buildings, and LG-TEK, a language software company.  

Much of the evening session focused on discussion of security clearances, which are required for many jobs in Fort Meade.

Officials from agencies and contractors at the Army base said people often assume that security clearances are hard to get and take a long time to process.

Not so, said Jack Amhrein, the deputy chief of adjudications at NSA. Amhrein said job applicants aren’t immediately rejected because of some bad decisions in the past. Rather, he said, candidates are evaluated based on the pattern of their current behavior. He also said the average time to process a security clearance is 69 days, not several months or a year, as many believe.

“It does us no good to put obstacles up,” Amhrein said. “I don’t get any bonuses for giving people a hard time.”

DISA will be bringing the largest number of workers to Fort Meade, with more than 4,200 expected to be in place by the end of May. A DISA official said that at this point, most of the workers are not new employees, and have been willing to commute from homes in Northern Virginia, where DISA was formerly headquartered. But officials are actively recruiting in Maryland.

“The one change for us is that those who are of retirement age will be retiring,” said Rebecca Polansky, a human resource specialist with DISA. “That’s still to come as people get up here and realize they don’t want to make that commute.”

Melissa Davey of Laurel was among the job-seekers at Tuesday’s session. After recently earning an advanced business degree, she came to learn more about the possible opportunities in that field, and familiarize herself with the security clearance process.

“I realized there are a lot of contractors out there, it’s not just agencies at Fort Meade,” Davey said. “I’ve never applied for a government job, though, so coming here took away some of the intimidation factor."


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