There is a stretch of my career I tend to skip over. When I tell the story of how I got here, I usually start somewhere around Zekiah, sometimes a little earlier, but the three years I spent at Booz Allen Hamilton in the 1990s rarely get more than a sentence. I move past them quickly. They do not fit the story tech culture tends to reward now.
Tech culture likes the founder narrative. It likes the pivot, the small team, the idea nobody else saw coming. A large federal consulting firm in the 1990s does not exactly fit that pattern. Somewhere along the way, without quite deciding to, I absorbed enough of that story that I edited those years down to a line on a resume. I am not sure when I started doing that, but I have been doing it for a while.
I have been thinking about those three years again because of something I keep noticing in people in the middle of their careers. Mid-career can be disorienting. You can sense things changing without quite understanding how, or where to go with the sense. I built my own reputation on deep technical geospatial capability, and that reputation rewarded me well. I did some of the most important work of my career on the strength of it. But it has a ceiling, and the ceiling is not monetary. It is a ceiling on agency.
As long as you stay in that role, and I would extend this to technical team leads and similar positions, you are often waiting for someone else to decide your next move. The issue was not that I lacked ambition or wanted a different kind of career. The issue was that I had no good way to steer the one I had. I have never felt I had less footing in my career than during that period, despite my track record of demonstrated expertise.
What I have come to think, looking back, is that the training I received early in my career at Booz Allen is part of why I eventually got past the ceiling. It is also why it has been on my mind lately.
Before I go further, I should be clear about what I am not claiming. I left BAH a long time ago. The firm has since been sold, restructured, taken public, and split. I have talked to enough people who have worked there in the last decade or so to know it is a structurally different company than the one I joined. I do not know what it does for professional development now, and this post is not a comparison between BAH then and BAH now. It is a description of what I experienced in three specific years in the 1990s.
What that experience gave me, more than anything else, was the practice of reading the terrain ahead of me so I could figure out where I wanted to steer. That capability came in three layers, and the layers were different in kind.
The first was a working understanding of the business of federal contracts. Not federal contracting as a topic, but as a system: how contracts were acquired, how they were structured, and how they were managed across their lifecycle. That kind of understanding is not just a skill. It is a model of the world. It lets you walk into a room and recognize the shape of a conversation that someone without that grounding would only see on the surface.
The second was a set of business development techniques that were optimized by role. Most BD training is generic: here is how to qualify a lead, here is how to write a proposal, here is how to manage the pipeline. What I learned was more deliberate. BD looked different at different levels, and the firm had figured out those differences and taught them on purpose.
A core part of what they taught me was how to take the work I had already done, past performance in the language of the trade, and use it as a proof point to get more interesting work with a new client. That sounds simple written down. It is not, and almost no one teaches it deliberately.
The third layer is the one I find myself thinking about most now. The training was professional and well thought out. I do not mean polished. I mean that someone had clearly thought hard about what a person in my role needed to know, in what sequence, and with what reinforcement. There was a curriculum behind it. Someone had designed it. For what it is worth, it is arguable that I accumulated more useful business knowledge in those three years than I did in my MBA. I will leave that observation there and move on.
There were limits, of course. The training covered contract financial management, but it could not have anticipated the need to understand SaaS unit economics. The deeper value was not in any one technique they taught me. It was in learning to care about the business context in the first place. They taught me how to survey the terrain. They did not give me a map, which was just as well because the map would have gone stale quickly.
Specific business knowledge has a half-life. Orientation does not, or at least decays much more slowly. The lasting value was not the business knowledge itself. It was learning how to keep my bearings as the business context changed around the work. That orientation has compounded across decades and across industries that did not exist when I was being trained.
I am aware of how this sounds. I had access to something most mid-career practitioners now do not, and the natural reaction is to wonder why I am bothering to describe it. But I think there is another way to look at it. The problem for the modern mid-career practitioner is not access to the content I was taught. Much of that has been broadly available for years on Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, YouTube, and in the trade press, often free. The missing piece is that nobody is doing the curriculum work anymore.
The platforms have everything, which is a different problem from having the right thing. What the curriculum did for me, underneath the specific content, was decide on my behalf what I should be learning, in what sequence, given where I was sitting and what I was trying to become. Institutions used to make some of those decisions for people. Now individuals are largely left to make them for themselves, often without realizing the job has been handed to them. That is not a failure of initiative. It is a failure of structure.
The point of doing that job is agency. Not founding a company. Not moving into management. Not following whatever career shape the current market happens to be celebrating. Agency is the ability to steer yourself in the direction you actually want to go, including staying close to the technical work you love, but doing it on terms you have chosen rather than terms chosen for you. Agency is not ambition. Agency is the ability to decide. That early training made deciding possible.
I do not have a tidy program for building that kind of perspective on your own, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to. What I can describe is what the work consists of in general terms. It is paying attention to who is making decisions in your environment and on what basis. It is asking, of every piece of work you do, what the customer is actually buying when they buy the deliverable. It is reading sideways: the trade press and analyst reports of the industries you sell into, rather than your own. It is doing this without being asked to and without anyone noticing you are doing it, over long enough that the attention begins to compound.
The work is slow and solitary and produces no credential. It produces orientation, which is the thing the platforms and the certifications and the management books cannot give you, because none of them know your situation.
That is an unsatisfying answer, I know. It would be cleaner to end with a framework, a reading list, or a five-step plan for becoming more strategic. But I do not think that is where the market is right now. The content problem has largely been solved. The curriculum problem has not. Until institutions start doing that work again, individuals are left to build that capability more deliberately from the work already in front of them, imperfectly and often in public. That is not fair, but recognizing the problem at least makes it possible to work on the right one.
I have been doing some version of this for twenty-five years, and I can tell you what it produces in practice. I still have my technical skills. I have taught myself a dozen programming languages since I left BAH, I have gotten proficient with the cloud and with AI, and I will keep adding to that pile because the pile is part of the work. But every one of those additions was a decision, made deliberately, in a context I had developed enough orientation to read. I did not learn AI because the market said I should. I learned it because I could see, from the vantage point I had built, where it was going to start mattering for the kind of work I wanted to keep doing, and roughly when.
I see the same pattern in my consulting work, just on a shorter clock. In the past few years, I have had to develop working fluency in fiber network design, fiber service billing, hydrographic surveying, dredge management, and AI governance. I came pre-trained on none of those, and in each case I had to learn fast enough to be useful to a customer paying for a result. Consulting forces the practice. Every engagement either teaches you something genuine about a domain you did not know, or the engagement fails.
The same habit works at different scales. Over a career, it helps you decide what to learn next and where to place your effort. Inside a consulting engagement, it helps you understand the customer’s world quickly enough to be useful. The pattern is the same in both cases: figure out what matters, learn enough to move, and get to work.
This is what I was editing out of my career narrative when I minimized those three years at BAH. Not the federal contracting knowledge, which is mostly obsolete. Not the specific BD techniques, though I still use a few of them unchanged. What mattered was the habit of deciding what to learn next, and having enough confidence to walk into unfamiliar terrain and operate.
I started this blog twenty years ago to share the kind of information I was looking for at the time and not finding: code snippets, how-tos, and practical notes from the work. The web was harder then. I think I am doing the same thing now. The topic has changed. I am going to stop pretending those three years at BAH are too unfashionable to mention.
Header image: Tmaurizia, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
