How Margarita Howard’s HX5 Finds Cleared Engineers by Supporting Their Growth

Margarita Howard has a name for the perfect defense contractor: “purple unicorn.” 

Howard, the founder and CEO of contractor HX5, explains that the term describes a person who is, in combination, rare enough to seem like a fantasy: an engineer who holds an active security clearance, has the advanced STEM credentials that government research programs require, and has spent enough time inside a government program to understand how those agencies actually function. 

The scarcity of this model employee isn’t explained by insufficient effort from contractors. Rather, it reflects how few people have ever cleared the full bar, with an advanced degree, active clearance, and government program experience, accumulated in a sequence that takes years to complete.

HX5 is a Florida-based defense and aerospace contractor Margarita Howard founded in 2004. It now operates across more than 20 states at approximately 70 government locations. The company employs roughly 1,000 people supporting the Department of Defense and NASA in research and development, engineering, and information technology. Howard runs a company that lives or dies by its ability to find people the market consistently undersupplies.

A Limited Number of Clearances

About 2 million Americans hold active security clearances (less than 0.6% of the population), while estimates put the number of open cleared positions at somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 at any given time. 

Ninety-two percent of cleared professionals are already employed. Demand for cleared specialists has been growing 7 to 10% annually. The clearance process itself generally runs six to twelve months. 

About one-third of all aerospace and defense engineering and manufacturing roles are held by workers 55 or older, according to a McKinsey analysis cited by the Aerospace Industries Association, a ratio substantially higher than the national industry average. Defense industry employment has contracted from roughly 3.2 million workers at its mid-1980s peak to around 1.1 million today. The National Defense Magazine found that 82% of companies in the defense industrial base report difficulty locating qualified STEM workers. The Semiconductor Industry Association projects a deficit of 1.4 million technicians, computer scientists, and engineers across the broader economy by 2030. 

Those numbers describe the kind of shortage that doesn’t respond to more aggressive recruiting, because the supply problem and the demand problem are operating on entirely different timescales.

“Our focus is professional support services in research and development and in specialty areas, primarily the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math,” Howard said. “Across the DoD and NASA, those are the specialties that make up our primary workforce. They have to have advanced education.” 

She described a talent profile that requires the right degree, the right clearance, and the right experience with government programs specifically. Not commercial tech work, not academic research alone, but the actual rhythm of defense program support. Each additional filter reduces the eligible population. Apply all three simultaneously and you’ve arrived at something that has a limited natural supply.

Margarita Howard’s University Strategy

What HX5 has been building is a longer-horizon answer to this problem. Howard has cultivated relationships with academic institutions: research collaborations in which HX5 engages with universities not primarily as a recruiter, but as a working partner. Graduate students on those collaborations are exposed to defense-agency environments before they’ve entered the job market. If the experience takes hold, and if they’re on a career path that makes them clearance-eligible, then the clearance clock can begin much earlier than it otherwise would. The six to twelve months of processing time (the dead period between hiring a cleared professional and deploying one) starts running before the employment relationship has begun.

“One of our most valuable partnerships has been with academic institutions,” Howard said. “Collaborating with universities on supporting research initiatives has helped us stay ahead of the emerging technologies, and also foster a pipeline of talented graduates that may come to work for us or contribute on a short-term basis.” 

What $190 Million Tells You About the Problem

The federal government has been arriving at a related conclusion, on a different timeline and a considerably larger scale.

In August 2024, the Department of Defense awarded RTI International a cooperative agreement valued at up to $190 million to continue leading the Defense Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Consortium, a program that has been led by RTI since 2019 and is now renewed for another decade. The consortium coordinates 28 partner organizations working on STEM programming for K-16 students and educators, organized around five core areas: consortium management, research and evaluation, strategic communications and outreach, regional hubs and ecosystems, and what the program calls “strategic STEM initiatives.” 

“To build the STEM workforce of tomorrow,” said Dr. Rebecca Stanley, the DSEC consortium chair at RTI, “we need to offer students meaningful experiences that connect them with real-world careers and help them see STEM careers as achievable and exciting.” That framing is carefully optimistic. A commitment of that scale, extended over a full decade, reflects the DoD’s assessment that the cleared STEM workforce can’t be rebuilt from the middle of the pipeline. It has to be rebuilt from the beginning.

The DSEC’s work at the K-16 level, introducing students to defense-relevant STEM careers before they’ve made any professional commitments, mirrors what HX5’s university partnerships do further along the same pipeline, at the graduate and research level. They’re different interventions at different points in an identical problem. Neither initiative emerged from a federal mandate. Both came from organizations that looked at the supply math and decided that waiting for the market to self-correct was not actually a plan.

The Case for Patience

Commercial technology companies don’t require clearances. They often operate without geographic constraints. They can offer compensation structures that government contracting rates may struggle to match. 

Howard says HX5 competes on different terms, those of connecting to real-world value and intellectual engagement. “You have to get up in the morning and be excited about the particular program you’re supporting,” she said. “Let’s get to the moon, let’s accomplish this mission overseas.” 

The retention numbers at HX5 suggest this pitch has real force. Howard explained that many employees have stayed for more than a decade.

What the university strategy adds to this picture is a longer investment horizon. A graduate student who encounters HX5 through a research collaboration and eventually enters the cleared workforce may, in some cases, not be a productive hire for years. The return on that relationship is slow, and a substantial share of those students will take the commercial path anyway. It’s a difficult investment to justify in a single budget cycle. Most companies don’t make it.

“We try to stay ahead of changing technologies, AI, and cybersecurity,” Howard said. “I saw it was important to get started on it early and we have.” She was talking about technology investment, specifically about the decision to build AI capability before competitors recognized they needed it. But if you listen to that sentence while looking at the cleared talent market, the demographic curve of the defense workforce, and the nine-figure investment the federal government is now making to rebuild a pipeline at the student level, you start to recognize that the same logic applies. Starting early, before the problem becomes acute, before the competition for existing cleared talent drives costs past the point of sustainability. 

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