From Air Force Service to CEO: Margarita Howard’s Path
Before she became CEO of HX5, Margarita Howard served in the Air Force, an experience that later shaped both her career and her approach to hiring other veterans. After leaving military service, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and worked in the defense industry on the Tricare military health care program, gaining a closer look at how contractors and federal agencies coordinate with one another.
That trajectory eventually led her to HX5, a service-disabled veteran-owned and women-owned small business operating across more than 20 states and over 70 government locations in support of Department of Defense and NASA missions nationwide.
Translating Service Into a Hiring Approach
“My background was influenced by military service,” Howard says of her leadership style, crediting her Air Force years with giving her direct knowledge of clearance requirements and the operational habits that carry over into contract work today.
Since 2021, that perspective has translated into HX5 hosting eight fellows through the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship Program, holding steady at two fellows per year. The fellowship, run under the Department of Defense’s SkillBridge initiative, places active-duty members with host companies for their final 180 days of service, mixing four days of hands-on work with one day of professional development weekly.
Howard has emphasized hiring people with prior Department of Defense or NASA experience, noting that such backgrounds differ meaningfully from commercial-sector work in ways that matter to her hiring decisions. Her own resume, blending military service with contracting experience, reflects exactly that kind of background.
Margarita Howard’s journey from service member to company leader offers a template that HX5’s fellowship program now extends to a new group of transitioning troops each year, one class at a time. Few of those fellows will follow an identical path to the CEO’s office, but the underlying pattern, service followed by education and then applied contracting experience, remains visible in how the company frames its hiring. Refer to this article for related information.
Find more information about Margarita Howard on https://www.margaritahoward.com/