When the DoD released its Q2 2025 SkillBridge statistics, the numbers had the look of a story that had already settled. Roughly 9,200 position announcements. More than 6,300 partner organizations. Around twenty-five thousand service members enrolled or completing programs during fiscal year 2025.
But the question was what any of those figures actually measured. They count who showed up. They say nothing about where those people landed.
An organization that builds a structured twelve-week fellowship, places fellows in roles where their military experience has direct operational value, and converts most of them into permanent employees shows up in the data the same way as a company that accepts DoD-funded labor for 180 days and declines to hire when the clock expires. Both count as SkillBridge partners. Both generate position announcements. You can’t tell from the aggregate figures whether those 6,344 organizations built genuine talent pipelines or ran extended auditions for jobs that were never seriously on offer. The headline numbers were an enrollment count. What they didn’t measure was what happened to the service members inside them.
Margarita Howard, the founder of defense contractor HX5, has been running the intentional version since 2021. Her program is small by design, converts at a high rate, and has earned federal recognition for veteran employment outcomes that the aggregate statistics don’t capture. How she built it is where the numbers start to mean something.
Participation Without Placement
SkillBridge allows service members within their last 180 days of active duty to intern or train with civilian employers while the DoD continues paying their military salary and benefits. For the employer, the direct cost is zero. The theory is that a well-designed fellowship produces candidates who understand civilian work environments and are ready for permanent employment, ideally at the company that hosted them.
That’s the theory. What the DoD found, as the program scaled, was that participation rates and hire rates had become nearly untethered. Only about 11% of eligible service members participate at all, mostly because awareness remains low. Of those who do participate, outcomes depend almost entirely on how the employer designed the engagement.
The DoD imposed a correction this year. Beginning June 30, 2025, every participating employer was required to execute a new Memorandum of Understanding establishing a “high probability of employment” — a 75% hire rate floor among fellows who complete the program, with an 85% goal. Minimum intake quotas were scaled to company size. New standards were written for training plans and salary expectations. Those requirements were a formal acknowledgment that the program had been running with a strong reputation and limited visibility into which partners were actually earning it. The requirements codified what the better-performing programs had been doing on their own for years.
Margarita Howard: Mission Experience Is Different
Margarita Howard founded HX5 in Fort Walton Beach, Florida in 2004, and built it over two decades into a prime contractor with roughly 1,000 employees at approximately 70 government locations across more than 20 states.
Howard is an Air Force veteran and service-disabled veteran, whose path into defense contracting began in uniform. HX5 joined the SkillBridge network in 2021 through the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship Program, a twelve-week initiative that places transitioning service members with employer partners four days a week, with a fifth day reserved for professional development. Since then, HX5 has hosted eight fellows — two per year.
What stands out about that figure, against the company’s scale, is how clearly it reflects a deliberate constraint. This isn’t a program HX5 scaled to fill pipeline vacancies or used to sample candidates in bulk. It runs at the size that allows Howard to design each placement carefully.
The work HX5 does on Department of Defense and NASA contracts, spanning research and development, engineering, information technology, and mission operations, requires candidates she describes as “purple unicorns”: people who hold active security clearances, carry the relevant technical credentials, and have direct experience supporting government agency programs from the inside. You can recruit engineers with strong commercial track records. What you typically can’t find, at least not without considerable effort, is an engineer who already understands how a program office actually functions: how contracting officers think about performance, what mission-critical means when the consequences of failure are operational rather than reputational, how the culture of a classified defense environment differs from the culture of a product company. A résumé can document a clearance level and a job title. The contextual knowledge of how a defense program actually operates accumulates over years of working inside one — which is precisely the knowledge a SkillBridge fellow carries in with them on day one.
“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 said. The twelve-week fellowship, run the way HX5 runs it, with fellows in real operational roles and evaluated against the same performance standards as permanent staff, works partly as a filter for exactly that knowledge. HX5 learns whether a fellow’s government background translates to their specific programs. The fellow learns whether HX5’s environment suits what they want to do next. That mutual evaluation is what separates an intentional program from an opportunistic one. The fellowship is a reciprocal investment. Reciprocal investments convert at different rates than low-cost trial arrangements.
The retention numbers bear that out. HX5’s veteran workforce exceeds 30% of total headcount, roughly five times the national private-sector average the Bureau of Labor Statistics has measured at approximately 6%. Howard attributes part of that stability to the nature of the work itself. She tells potential hires that HX5 is where you’d go to do work that “gets to the moon” or “accomplish a mission overseas.”
“The work we do is very exciting,” she said. “Some of it is not being done anywhere else in the world.”
Raising the Bar
The HIRE Vets Gold Medallion the Department of Labor awarded HX5 in 2025 is the federal government’s only veteran-employment recognition earned on measurable data: hire rates, retention percentages, professional development practices. The company’s 30% veteran workforce supports it. So does the conversion record that tracks with the Hiring Our Heroes program-wide hire average of 80%, where fellows land at average starting salaries of $70,000 and reach stable employment within one month at nearly double the rate of transitioning veterans without structured support: 63% versus 38%.
The broader aerospace and defense labor market puts those numbers in sharper context. Blue Signal’s 2025 industry analysis found that demand for cleared, technically credentialed professionals (aerospace engineers, systems engineers, security-cleared project managers) continues to outrun supply, with hiring identified as a top operational constraint across the sector. You can understand, given that pressure, why companies reach for SkillBridge as a short-term staffing convenience. Pre-cleared, technically trained candidates. No direct labor cost. Structurally, the program almost invites you to run it as a trial mechanism, and the temptation is real.
But the outcome data puts a price on that approach. The gap between an intentional SkillBridge program and a perfunctory one runs through the hire rate, the salary outcome, and the time to stable employment for the service member at the other end. In the Hiring Our Heroes data, that gap is large enough to matter to anyone transitioning out of service. The DoD’s 2025 MOU reforms, which established minimum hire-rate floors and intake quotas, are an attempt to encode that distinction into the program by regulation.
HX5 didn’t wait for the regulation. Howard was an Air Force veteran before she was a defense contractor. She knew — at a level that credential-matching alone doesn’t capture — what transition looks like when an employer takes it seriously. That history shows in the HIRE Vets record, in the 30% figure, and in the pipeline logic the DoD is now trying to make universal.
The companies that’ll benefit most from the new MOU standards are the ones that look at what successful veteran-employing companies like HX5 have built and recognize a model. Two fellows a year. An 80% conversion. A veteran workforce five times the national average. A federal medal for the effort. The same decision, made the same way, for a decade.