Margarita Howard Says University Ties Give HX5 a Talent Edge
When Margarita Howard talks about hiring, the word “experienced” comes up often. HX5, the defense contractor she founded and leads, operates in technical domains where prior government program exposure isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a functional requirement. Security clearances take a year or more to obtain. Procurement culture, agency-specific protocols, and the operational norms of DoD and NASA programs take longer still to internalize. A hire who already carries all of that walks in ready to work.
“Experience in their respective fields, while supporting these agencies’ respective programs and missions, is very different from experience gained from working in the commercial world,” Howard has explained. Many HX5 employees have been with the company a decade or more, some approaching 15 years, a retention record that reflects how much the company values that institutional depth once it’s in the door.
A Surprising Partnership That Delivered
Against that backdrop, Howard’s own description of how university partnerships emerged is telling. “One of our most valuable partnerships, that we just did not know about or expect such wonderful results to come about, has been with academic institutions,” she said. The expectation that academia might not yield much for a firm with such specific hiring criteria made the results more striking.
“Collaborating with the universities on 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,” Howard said. The two outputs — technology access and candidate development — come from a single investment in research collaboration, a practical arrangement for a company with roughly 1,000 employees that can’t match the campus recruitment budgets of major defense primes.
Graduate students who contribute to HX5 research projects enter the company’s hiring pipeline with demonstrated technical performance already on record. They know the company’s government client context. They have worked against its technical standards. The gap between unfamiliar candidate and viable hire is shorter for them than for a cold applicant, even one with strong credentials.
The Scale of the Workforce Problem
The workforce math that pushes Margarita Howard toward universities is not specific to HX5. The National Defense Industry Association’s Vital Signs 2025 report documented the defense sector’s contraction from 3 million workers in 1985 to 1.1 million by 2021. Fifty-three percent of respondents in that report found STEM hiring somewhat or very difficult. The Semiconductor Industry Association projects a deficit of approximately 1.4 million STEM workers by 2030.
The Department of Defense has invested in structural responses, including a 10-year, $190 million renewal of its Defense STEM Education Consortium in 2024, managed by RTI International, which had already served more than 208,000 students. For Margarita Howard, university partnerships are HX5’s version of that investment — sized for the company she runs, aimed at the same long-term problem.