Defense contractor HX5 operates across more than 70 government locations, providing research and development, engineering, and mission operations support to NASA and the Department of Defense. The people those programs require are hard to produce at scale: STEM professionals with advanced credentials, active security clearances, and direct experience inside government agencies. HX5 CEO Margarita Howard has called this combination “purple unicorns” — rare by nature and shrinking in supply.
The defense sector’s talent pressures are well-documented. The National Defense Industry Association’s Vital Signs 2025 report noted the industry employed 3 million workers in 1985 and 1.1 million by 2021. The same report found that 53% of respondents describe it as somewhat or very difficult to find STEM workers, with competition from the commercial sector cited as a primary barrier. The Semiconductor Industry Association projects a shortfall of approximately 1.4 million technicians, computer scientists, and engineers by 2030.
Universities Fill a Gap the Traditional Pool Cannot
HX5 has long prioritized experienced hires — professionals who arrive with clearances in hand and government program experience on their resumes. Security clearances can take a year or more to process; contractors on active programs can’t absorb that delay easily. Experienced hires sidestep the problem. But as that population ages out and commercial companies compete aggressively for the same people, exclusive reliance on it becomes harder to sustain.
University partnerships offer Margarita Howard and HX5 a different kind of return. Research collaborations provide early access to emerging technologies before they enter mainstream defense adoption — AI tools, new engineering approaches, advanced materials — through faculty and graduate students working at the frontier of their fields. That exposure to innovation has value regardless of whether any particular researcher goes on to join the company.
“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. Graduate students who participate in joint research arrive at the hiring stage already familiar with HX5’s technical environment and government client work, shortening the evaluation process considerably.
Where the Broader Industry Is Heading
HX5’s approach reflects a wider industry trend. The Department of Defense in 2024 renewed its Defense STEM Education Consortium as a 10-year, $190 million cooperative agreement managed by RTI International, which had already reached more than 208,000 students and nearly 9,000 educators. Programs like the University of Florida’s FINS Talent Pipeline now pre-screen engineering undergraduates for national security careers, providing clearance-readiness preparation years before graduation.
For a firm of roughly 1,000 employees, Margarita Howard’s university engagement model is leaner than what large primes like Lockheed Martin deploy, but it targets the same structural problem: building a durable talent pipeline into a workforce that cannot sustain itself on experienced hires alone.