Working in Health Tech at Booz Allen: Your FAQs

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Tiffany Worthington. I'm the event specialist on the event

team. I want to thank you all for joining our July Destination Booz Allen: Care for the Future. I'll hand it over to our moderator, Elliot Long.

Elliot: Thank you, Tiffany. Really appreciate it. And thank you for joining us today. We're excited to share with you and to share all about Booz Allen. As Tiffany said, I'm Elliot Long. And I'm a security risk specialist within our department of Veterans Affairs sub-account within Booz Allen, and we’ll talk a little more about what that is.

I'm excited to share with you not only about myself but about Booz Allen and how you can transform our nation's healthcare and lead and important change in life sciences today. We'll share our health and life sciences capabilities with you and how, here at Booz Allen, you're supported to grow and thrive in your career. At Booz Allen, we invest in you through funding and training programs to help you keep your skills up to date and sharp and moving forward into your career.

Today we're going to share a little bit about what it's like to work in health and life sciences here at Booz Allen. You're going it hear from our health team and some my esteemed colleagues and how they're delivering against some of the most meaningful and complex federal healthcare missions today. You'll get to learn about some of the work we do, including the types of projects that we support, how that work has made an impact on our world, as well as how that work has made an impact on our nation.

You'll also get to ask questions at the end. So at the end of the conversation, we're going to have a panel discussion. We're going to open it up to Q&A where you're going to get to ask your questions of our panelist. Please use the Q&A feature on the right-hand side of your screen to submit your questions.

Before we learn a little more about Booz Allen, I'm going to share about myself and then I'm going to hand it over to my esteemed colleagues here today to introduce themselves as well. I, personally, have been with the firm for four and a half years. I've moved around in the firm a little bit. The firm has a great ability to transition across markets and really great flexibility in that way.

I started in our DOD market and later moved into a group that we called our strategic innovation group that was focused on leading-edge innovation and creating new ideas and new technologies within the firm and within federal agencies.

From there, I've now moved over into the heath market for health and life sciences, more specifically, as I said, underneath the heath market, I'm supporting our Veterans Affairs client and their cybersecurity risk posture. My role as part of my interaction with the VA is really to help them understand where the risks are, where their critical vulnerabilities are within their environment, and develop and execute strategies to remediate those risks and improve upon their posture.

I'm going to hand it over to some of our panelists that we're going to hear from again later in the conversation today. Chandra, if I can hand it over to you to introduce yourself.

Chandra: Thank you, Elliot. I appreciate it. My name is Chandra Bowers, and I’ll tell you a little bit about myself. I am a public health strategy policy and operations expert here at Booz Allen. I'm aligned as well to the health account. And I've been at Booz Allen for a year and a half. And to be honest, I'm absolutely loving it. I feel so lucky to be empowered, to drive my career in the direction that I want while I'm at Booz. And I get to be on different projects, like I was in CMS before and now I'm in NIH, and I get all these amazing experiences where I can focus on public health broadly, of course, a passionate area of mine, and in heath equity as well, mostly in the past six months.

Lastly, I do support a homegrown initiative called Brains and Hearts as a team lead, where I cultivate different volunteer opportunities that other colleagues across the heath account can take part in to give back to the community.

As you can imagine, my former background is also in public heath strategy, and I've been fortunate this entire time to implement national strategies to improve health care in multiple countries, not only in the U.S., but abroad as well. Maybe just a little bit of something else. It doesn't have to do with Booz Allen but makes me normal: I am a wife of a veteran and mom of three beautiful children as well. Thank you so much, Elliot. And welcome to everyone that's on the call today.

Elliot: Great. Thank you, Chandra. Meaghan, let's hand it over to you next.

Meaghan: As you can see, I'm Meaghan Sloand. I studied international business and economics in college and joined Booz Allen in 2017. I joined my current project after completing one of the many educational opportunities that Booz offers, which is the Data Science 5K, and then I became an analyst on my current project, which is working in health data analytics for CMS to to audit the Medicaid and CHIP program eligibility and help CMS with deriving and analyzing that eligibility data across the U.S.

As an example, most recently this has been helping to find ways to capture and display some of those COVID policies that might vary state to state so that CMS can better understand the impact that those policies have had on eligibility and on different budgets.

And then a little bit about kind of outside of Booz Allen, outside of work, I try to get as much hiking as I can in the summer, as much downhill skiing as I can in the winter. And I do enjoy some rock climbing despite having a bit of a terrified of heights. Thank you, Elliot.

Elliot: Thank you. Meaghan. Jorge, over to you, sir.

Jorge: Thank you, Elliot. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming by today to this event. My name is Jorge Gomez-Danes. I'm a data engineer, big data. I've been involved in as a big data architect or data engineer for multiple projects for the civil sector. I've been a little over 18 plus years on data operations.

But my passion and what I've been working at Booz Allen for the last two years is about Cloud services and data analytics services, so everything related to how we can improve the way that they monitor, they review metrics, they review information that makes them for them and to discover programs and information that is not easy when you work with massive amount of data. So,  I've been two years at Booz Allen. I have a degree of computer systems engineer. I did an MBA a couple of years back, and I'm training to become more on the leadership side to help teams to grow, help teams to be able to deliver the goals and the process that we want to deliver to our customers and clients. That's pretty much it about me. Thanks, Elliot.

Elliot: All right. Thank you, Jorge. Katie?

Katie: Hello, hello. I’m live from Atlanta, Georgia. My name is Katie Koenig, and I recently reentered the workforce about three years ago, after taking a pause to raise my three beautiful children. My background is in sales and marketing in the hospitality industry. However, I began upskilling with the intention to pivot into the IT industry. Specifically, I spent time learning Salesforce and business analyst skills. About two years ago, I began working with a smaller consultancy who was also in the government sector but was recently acquired by Booz Allen. A year ago, we became a part of the Booz Allen family. It's been a great experience just to be able to be part of a larger consultancy. Initially, quite honestly, I was a little nervous, but it has been nothing but a positive experience since we became part of Booz Allen.

I am continuing to work now as a business analyst on a large modernization effort for the Department of Veterans Affairs. It's an effort to update and standardize the clinical context centers across the country for veterans and ensure that they have access to standardized care no matter where they may live in the country.

As a business analyst, I really am the conduit between both our stakeholders and the client as well as our development team, both from the technical perspective, our change management team, the trainers. So I really act as that, like I said, the conduit in between everyone to communicate back the requirements from the client to our team itself.

I spend a lot of time regularly engaging with our client. I have three children: one has recently graduated from college, the other is in college, and I have another one in high school. Just really enjoying being part of Booz Allen.

Elliot: Fantastic. Thank you, Kati. And, last but not least, JC, I'm going to hand it over to you.

Hello and welcome. My name is JC Reed. I am a talent acquisition associate here on the people services team at Booz Allen, and I specifically support our heath market. The skill sets I support are everything involving consulting. Similar to my leader here, Elliot, I moved around the firm a few times. Four years ago when I started, I supported our analytics team, doing highly cleared recruiting, moved to our engineering team, where I served the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, and Aerospace markets. And about a year ago I moved here to our consulting team and focus again on just the heath market.

A little bit about myself: I'm born and raised here in Northern Virginia, living in Washington D.C. now.

I have a bachelor’s degree from West Virginia University in business. I’m an avid outdoorsman; I love being outside.  Anything from biking here in the area to playing golf or just catching a baseball game is how I like to spend my time outside of work. It's good to be with all you guys and thanks so much for joining us.

All right. Thank you, and thank you to all of our panelists, really appreciate hearing about all of your diverse backgrounds. And I think we've all gathered I'm the only one that doesn't have the life outside of Booz Allen on the call today. But that is all right.

Really looking forward to hearing more about you and your backgrounds a little bit later today. And for everyone who dialed in, one more reminder. If anything from any of our panelists' backgrounds sparked your interest, please remember to add your questions to the Q&A on the right side of your screen.

Okay. So talents are the gateway to your future. So here at Booz Allen, we're already changing the world and for the better. Our work has transformed the way organizations serve customers and citizens. We've kept soldiers safer on battlefields, we furthered place exploration, we’ve disrupted human trafficking networks, and we’ve protected even connected cars from cyber attacks.

We're at the leading edge of domains like artificial intelligence, data sciences, digital transformation, cybersecurity, health and life sciences, as well as engineering. Our employees not only get to design but also build and integrate future-forward solutions into realms like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 5G, the Internet of Things, and even can quantum computing.

Our people get to use their skills and knowledge to drive change to accomplish important missions. We're collectively motivated to make the world better. A little more information about who we are and what we do and what we serve is that we're a diverse firm with tons of experience which is great for our clients but also means our employees bet get the best of both worlds. We get the stability and resources within an established company, paired with the agility of small collaborative teams that have the support of huge, diverse networks behind them.

We employee employ over 27,000 people today. We have both public and private sector clients. Our headquarters are in Virginia, in McLean, to more specific, and we have locations all over the world.

We even heard from our panelists today that not all of us are here on the East Coast. We have a large veterans employee population, and we're also recognized as one of the best employers for diversity, equity, and inclusion by Forbes, as well as a World’s Most Ethical Company by Ethisphere.

Over a third of our employees have professional certifications and higher education degrees. Many of our employees have obtained these certifications and degrees through what we call our FlexEd benefit, which provides you funding to take training and courses that enhance your skills in your job area.

At Booz Allen, we also help public health and medical research organizations across the federal government translate research to advance every day patient care, detect safety concerns, and push innovation through emerging technologies. We help health agencies make critical decisions to anticipate trends and support scientific discovery through sophisticated analytics and emerging technologies. And we're not just using technologies through commercial, off-the-shelf. We are also using technologies that we are growing in-house. 

We're not just technologists and strategists at Booz Allen. Our clinicians, our scientists, our data analysts are helping to refine experimental design, embed innovative technologies to advance data collection and processing, advance precision medicine, and drive public health missions.

Our health and life science teams provide support in helping to improve the way the government delivers healthcare, ensure military readiness, secure the economic stability of those entitled to benefits, conduct scientific research, and even protect public health.

Between working with the newest technologies and solving real-world health challenges, you'll know what you're working on has a direct impact on the nation's healthcare. We are the only company in the world that holds all three of the U.S. government's elite cybersecurity accreditations. We hold NSA CIRA accreditation, the NSA VAS accreditation, and we even hold the GSA Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services.

We provide support and consulting to the military health system in leading the largest deployment of the new federal electronic health record in history, providing every service member, veteran, and beneficiary with a single record across the continuum of service to our nation, whether they're in the military now or have been in the military in the past.

We also defend more than 80% of the federal .gov devices and endpoints through our continuous diagnostics and mitigation program, CDM. There we design, integrate, and operationalize end to end cyber security capabilities to fortify the cybersecurity posture across agencies across the federal government .gov space.

The health care industry's clinical business and technology landscapes are constantly evolving today. Staying ahead demands the demands the deep understanding in knowing our clients and their industries from the inside out.

Having managed some of the world's most sensitive mission-critical healthcaresystems, our health and life science team design, build, and implement end-to-end solutions that continuously transform health by improving processes and systems.

Booz Allen supports hundreds of projects with the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA, the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Defense Health Agency, just to name a few.

For nearly seven decades, we have supported the Department of Veterans Affairs in more than 600 initiatives. We're helping the Military Health System lead the largest deployment of federal electronic health record in history, and we are providing every service member, veteran, and beneficiary with that single record for their health records.

We're using forward-looking health capabilities and IT applications to help improve the well-being and safety of all of our citizens. We provide technical and consulting expertise and translate research into real-world applications. We're improving clinical outcomes, advancing precision medicine, and helping to drive the public health mission. With that said, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague JC to talk more about what your experience here at Booz Allen is going to look like. JC?

JC: Alright. Thank you, Elliot. I'd like to talk about some of the fun stuff, some of the good stuff I like to talk about every day as a recruiter. Training and upskilling: These programs listed below are designed to provide you with opportunities to choose. You're empowered to live your best life while making a tangible global impact. At Booz Allen, we appreciate everything that our employees do, and we invest in our people providing training and mentorship so you can upskill and reskill. We have examples here of some of our training and upskilling. Our Tech Excellence program is an intensive cohort development program where we have the opportunity to hire folks to upskill them in the fundamentals of data science.

Our FlexEd, which was touched on earlier by Elliot, is a tuition reimbursement program designed to take your career to the next level, whether that is continuing your education toward a degree, certification or any type of professional certificate process.

With Degreed, that is our online learning platform, employees can access our learning resources at any time and place that works for them.

Our Expert’s Program can help you build the career you want here internally with skills and knowledge that can be applied across the range of our clients and markets.

What to expect with the journey with Booz Allen. Our recruiting approach here is a very candidate-centric approach. We take the time to listen to our candidates, gather their feedback, and implement the changes throughout our process here in recruiting.

In this visualization here, you'll see the touch points on who you will be contacting, like myself and the People Services Team, a recruiter. Once a candidate applies to a position, you can expect your resumé and qualifications to be reviewed. You'll be reached out to a recruiter to schedule a career evaluation conversation.

From there, that information is represented over to our program managers and hiring managers. From their feedback, we set up an interview. As far as the selection process and the offer process to the acceptance and then to the onboarding. So, myself, my role as a recruiter, I manage all seven of the steps, when the candidate is applying all the way to their onboarding.

If you have questions about career resources feel free to visit careers.boozallen.com. There you'll find resources on the application process here at Booz Allen, including frequently asked questions, overview of our benefits, and interviewing tips that will help you with your career.

The next portion of our meeting today, we'll go through a Q&A.

Elliot, I'm going to ask you a question first. Can you share a little bit about the mission you're working in cyber security with the VA to help the VA stay protected from online threats?

Elliot: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, JC. That's a great question. So specifically within the VA and we have several missions that we support and several contracts actually with the VA client. I am more specifically on a contract that we call our TSS or Transformation Security Services contract. It's one of the largest projects that we have within the VA with over a thousand people on it, close to 500 of which are cybersecurity professionals, and I fall within that cybersecurity realm. My role as a leader on the TSS cyber side of the house is to work with the Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Information Officer, as well as our Director of the Enterprise Cybersecurity Program to look across the VA and identify what they call their material weakness, or basically what are the major gaps that continue to come up whenever someone comes in and performs an audit against their systems.

Those gaps for the VA have occurred year over year, and our mission right now, one of the CIO's top priorities is to remove that material weakness while he's in the seat. And so we've been helping the VA to establish not only a strategy for resolving their material weakness and resolving their cybersecurity threats but to address that as well. In fact, this week we kicked off a 60-day sprint on addressing some of their critical systems and bringing them “up to snuff,” as the CIO would say through shoe leather and tenacity. That's what I'm doing.

I see a few other questions coming in. Chandra, we're going to you next. You're working with a team that questions the way healthcare solutions are developed. Can you share a little bit about the types of areas your team is moving the needle on?

Chandra: So without divulging too much information, I am working to stand up a very new agency that has a focus on trying to decrease the speed to development for biomedical and health research.

It’s under the Department of Health and Human Services, but not divulging too much about it. My role specifically is as PMO, which is a role that not a lot of people know that Booz Allen can provide as a service here. And that's wrapped with strategy, relationship management, change management.

In supporting my client, what I do is I actually connect a lot of the dots around how this organization is really going to function on a day-to-day basis. I also have expertise in setting up strategic organizations, so I can bring that strategic expertise to my everyday work and be able to advise my client on what's some of the best courses of action for how they want to develop this organization, this agency.

And a little bit more about the agency. It's one of the more prominent, forthcoming agencies that has a pivotal requirement that every single structure, every single process, every single tool that we use is the most innovative, is the most new, is the most useful concept that we can possibly bring to healthcare so that, that way we're not increasing bureaucracy but actually decreasing the amount of time it takes to develop biomedical solutions, so that's a big deal. We're moving the needle, not only in infrastructure, but also in the actual subject matter area itself, bringing public health to the forefront and really focusing on equitable care and making sure that the research that we do develop is available to all. I know that was a lot, but it's such an exciting project. I can't say enough about it.

That sounds amazing. It sounds like you're getting into interesting, innovative processes there. Thank you, Chandra. All right. We're going to go ahead and jump over the next question,

Katie. You joined the firm when Booz Allen acquired Liberty IT Solutions. Can you share how the transition and your onboarding experience went?

Katie: I'd love to. Coming from a small consultancy to a firm as large as Booz Allen was intimidating, but throughout the entire transition process until we formally became part of Booz Allen, there was constant engagement from Booz Allen, helping to inform us of the culture and the vision and the mission behind everything that Booz Allen is doing both within the Department of Veterans Affairs, where my particular project was, but also across the entire government sector and other industries. The communication was fantastic, and I was really impressed with just the engagement being very personable, and so that of course carried through to the actual onboarding process when we officially became part of Booz Allen.

At that point, I head heard about the benefits and the wellness initiatives, the work life balance that a lot of companies talk about, a lot of buzzwords. Once we became part of the company, I was able to see that in action. I was like, this is actually for real.

Booz is really good about empowering employees to not only look out for that work-life balance component but also really trying to look at areas where you want to improve your own career goals. I think somebody had mentioned the FlexEd program. Unbelievably generous of the company. There are resources set aside for employees to be able to continue their professional development. Personally, I had the opportunity of joining the professional membership with the help of Booz Allen. I also acquired another Salesforce certification recently with their support, and I'm looking into a master’s program to continue growing my business analyst skills. These are things I may not have been able to do otherwise.

As I mentioned, the whole work-life balance, even though Booz Allen is a larger consultancy, it has a family feel. There are so many great programs in place that make the company feel smaller. They bring people together because of special interests, whether it be being outdoors or setting goals for personal wellness and well-being in addition to providing resources life challenges that may come up. All of that is to say that something I've been just really, really impressed with is the ability to just make the company feel a little bit smaller but seeing that they truly are genuinely sticking to the goal to really try to engage with and empower employees to just be better both in life and in their careers.

Elliot: Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you, Katie. If you just joined us, the Q&A is on the right side of your screen if you have a question about anything that you're hearing today.

Meaghan, the next question is for you. Can you share how you're making an impact in leading the charge in health analytics today?

Meaghan: As I mentioned before, the contracts that I work on is an audit program for CMS that helps to ensure eligibility across the states was determined properly based on state and federal policies that were in place. When I first started on the project, so much of the detail in these audits were written up in long narratives that CMS and that we would have to sift through just to get a clear understanding of how eligibility is being handled in each state. Since then, we've taken on several initiatives to really assess and then shore up the systems and the processes that are in place. So for data people out there, ensuring there's minimal garbage in. And then also breaking out as many of the data elements as possible. So it's much more easy to summarize and parse through that data and take that data and start creating dashboards, start creating actual analytics to help CMS make sense of all of that data.

And then on top of that, we're also working with CMS on several pilot programs where we're aiming to use machine learning, optical character recognition, rules and gens, etc. to take some of the the monotonous work out of the data entry and audit work and allow our auditors to really focus on the policies and doing what they do best: using their specialized knowledge for these audits instead.

Elliot: Fantastic. Thank you, Meaghan. JC, next question for you. What brought you to Booz Allen and how has the firm supported your career?

JC: Thank you for your question, Elliot. I was actually referred to Booz Allen. I had a few colleagues from a former organization come over and they had high praise for the firm, so I went through the interview process and accepted the job. I loved everything they were telling me and four years later everything is accurate.

What's keeping me here at Booz Allen and some of the things I enjoy about the firm, some the things I like talking about as a recruiter. I know it's been mentioned, but it's our FlexEd program, some of the resources that the firm has laid out for candidates is good stuff. I went through a professional certificate process through Michigan University fully paid. I was certified as a change management professional through the firm fully paid. I'm looking to kind of build and cultivate on skills and hone in, similar to some of my colleagues looking to build and see what the next steps are here at Booz Allen.

Elliot: Fantastic. Thank you. Jorge, how are you using your technical background to improve processes and systems for your health clients?

Thank you for the question. For the previous two years, working with the Veterans Affairs Department and the Office of Information Technology and the Program Management Office. Some of the interesting things here is that the digital transformation on how we are implementing processes to help them get better data, better insights, and better platforms in place to be able to utilize big data to make better decisions across the departments I mentioned before. Some of the technical background here is basically to have a long period of tenure learning and understanding the systems and how they use them to be able to move this data across on multiple processes and systems that will help them to utilize this. And again, one of the technical specifications here, the background is to understand the cloud computing and the cloud efforts, how we're utilizing them to specify what needs and criterias need this information. Because not one solution works for everything.

So that specific process on understanding the specific requirements, the specific needs of the health department and the health users, is how we look into the solutions we implement with them, providing them the best-in-class architectural processes, technologies, and also some of the things that we develop in-house as you mentioned before, to help them achieve these processes. It's been a very interesting journey and very emotional to be a part of engaging because at the end of the day, you see how the benefits come through having hundreds and hundreds of users to say, hey, yes, this is what we have been asking for and you have been helping us very well and successfully to implement the new processes for acquiring this data. That's amazing and gratifying to have.

Elliot: Fantastic. Thank you. The emotions and the mission really do play a critical factor in finding joy in what you're doing, right? Let's go ahead and move on to our next question here. I think I can probably take this one. As someone starting out in cybersecurity, do you have any advice on how to build a career inside of Booz Allen?

Yes, lots. So in Booz Allen we actually have something that I like to call the Cyber University. We actually have a full curriculum. And I know JC can jump in on this as well. We have a full curriculum all around cybersecurity, cybersecurity certification whether you're brand new, fresh out of school or 30 years into your career and you want to pivot your career into cyber, we have career paths for that. That is certainly something that I always recommend to folks. We have cohorts, we have master’s degree programs that you can go into.

Always, if you're looking into starting to build a career within cyber, we have something that we launched this year called TXGs, or Technical Exchange Groups. Those groups are community-based groups and one of them is the Cyber TXG, focused on all the cybersecurity professionals across the firm to be able to learn new things, exchange their ideas and their experiences, and really form a community around your profession. And those are some really great ways to build a career. JC, do you have anything you want to add to that?

JC: No, I've never focused on our cyber-specific roles, but my colleagues talk about it a lot. Right when you said it, I knew exactly what you were saying.

There are a couple of quick questions here, Elliot, I can touch on. One of the questions coming from folks is, what makes someone stand out while recruiting, especially recent graduates who don’t have much experience?

I would say a tailored resumé. You would think so, but if you’re applying to a communications positions and you have something misspelled on your resumé or if you’re applying to a systems engineer job and you're not outlining what you did specifically in model-based systems engineering on your resume, you get one chance to make a first impression.

The resumé is the first impression. Talking specifically about some of your coursework, what did you do in college? You don't necessarily have to have all these internship experiences. But tailoring your resumé and outlining the specifics you did in your coursework and how it relates to the requisition’s qualifications. I'm not saying you have to tailor your resumé to every job you apply to, but look at the job and if you see a direct correlation, add the keywords to your resumé to make it pop and highlight it. Having a skills overview where you're mentioning any type of technical software skills you have. That's good stuff that recruiters look at and verify. And some of our systems here at Booz Allen, specifically our CRM Workday, recruiters can go to that and filter by skill sets or degree or clearance. You always want to have that good stuff you have in your background, highlight it in your resumé.

Another question: Does Booz Allen hire rising sophomores as summer interns? I don’t think so—I know rising juniors. If you see positions that require a bachelor’s degree to be obtained by a specific timeframe of the year, I recommend applying. To my knowledge, we don't hire rising sophomores.

The last one I wanted to touch on specifically was: Would you be able to speak more specifically about the Tech Excellence program? Who is eligible? When is it taught? Length? Format?

I did support the data analytics team, the roll out we did for Tech Excellence program. It's specific around like a certain clearance and education. So if someone maybe has a TSSCI and is looking into break into data analytics maybe there's a Tech Excellence program or cohort that focuses on those folks. Giving them hands-on experience so after they graduate from the program they have an offer from Booz Allen. I will kick it over to Katie, moving from hospitality.

Katie: Yes. Okay, so as far as pivoting from one industry to another, hospitality to IT and what that all looked like and that journey. I know part of the question was about how Booz Allen supported that journey in particular.

And as I mentioned earlier, Booz Allen has this FlexEd program that is generous in helping individuals pursue different certifications or even degrees if they want to do that. And can there's also something I think that also is really beneficial is just a direct link to your manager and constant conversation about goals. Booz is really encouraging you to make goals about your professional development and match you up with those opportunities within the company or outside.

So I would say those are probably some of the best ways that I was able to kind of continue that learning.

I did see there was another question. I can touch on quickly. With regards to my favorite activity as a B.A. and certifications and training besides hands-on. So the second question, as far as certifications and training, I did go through a training program. At the time, it was in Covid, so it was remote and virtual but it was a consultancy certification that I obtained through a program. It was associated with Salesforce. That was one of the programs that I used with regards to upskilling.

But that consultancy program was incredibly beneficial. And then I also have tried to dive into membership organizations. There's the International Institute of Business Analysis which has a tremendous amount of resources both online, webinars, podcast, certifications you can pursue. There are some resources that are readily available to you.

As far as my favorite activity, you know, it's funny. I love talking to the client and really developing that relationship with them and being able to just really listen to their needs and their pain points. And then the reward of being able to bring that to fruition and find a solution for them. So that's my favorite part: putting the puzzle together and finding a way to add value to our client's issues that they're dealing with.

All right. Thank you, Katie. I know we have a few minutes left. I don't think we'll get through all the questions. But Chandra I see a few directed to you. I'm going to hand it over to you to respond to your questions.

Chandra: Do all the healthcare jobs at Booz Allen need a clearance? That’s based upon the client. So if  you have a Fed client that requires you to have clearance, you need one.

I noticed most of you had IT or business-related backgrounds. For those of you who are pursuing MPHs and  PHAs—my hometown—what other certifications would be good or looked favorably on by Booz Allen?

I have an MPH and MBA. However, what I will say is most important is being able to recognize that there are capabilities and there are subject matter areas when it comes to consulting. If you have subject matter expertise in public health or healthcare administration, you kind of want to marry that up with the capabilities that you can do.

So for instance, MPHs know how to run programs. That's what we do. If you can do that, you can say, I have a capability of program management, I may have the capability of strategy and writing policy. All those things are your capabilities that you want to showcase in addition to your subject matter areas.

And so that would probably be my best advice for trying to apply for any position at Booz Allen. Also there are definitely positions that are focused on various subject matter areas that are now under the umbrella of public health, including health equity.

One of the last questions here: I have a legal background and experience in sustainable development, social environmental and governance research and analysis. And I got working for an international organization in the private sector. Do you think my experience in policy analysis, comparative studies, and data collection analysis can be useful in your field?

I want to say yes. I just hired on someone that has pretty much your same background with the addition of compliance. So that individual is definitely getting involved in compliance, auditing for a lot of our processes, developing policies as well as getting into new areas like knowledge management and distance learning capabilities.

So there's definitely a lot of areas for that person to come in.

Someone asked, I have a volunteer project outside Booz Allen. Do they support you in this project?

The volunteer project is an internal Booz Allen effort. It's called Brains and Hearts, and that is an effort amongst all the different principal teams to make sure that there are opportunities within Booz Allen for us to give back. It's internal, and it is 100% supported by all of our leadership.

Elliot: A couple that I can hit on just quickly here. There's a question asking if how engaged is Booz Allen in implementing zero trust.

So zero trust architecture is a requirement of the Executive Order, so we are deeply involved in this. We have folks all the way up through our executive leadership who are experts in zero trust.

And we are not only implementing this within the VA and working with the VA to really develop what their zero trust strategy is going to be in conjunction with their material weakness. But we're also helping other agencies as well in order to figure out what the strategies are going to be.

There's a question about being a 25-year Army veteran with heavy background in managing medical devices and system maintenance programs. Is there a place at Booz Allen? Yes, absolutely. That's all I can say for that one. Absolutely.

And then JC, there's a question here for you just about sponsoring Visas for internationals. Do you have an answer for that one? Does Booz Allen sponsor Visas for international folks?

JC: Not 100%. I know I had positions that green card holders are eligible for, but not 100% positive on Visa for internationals.

Another one: Do all healthcare jobs require a clearance? No. That is a no. I have a couple positions now that only require folks to be clearable. So we're good there.

Okay. Awesome. All right. Let's see if, I think we have time for one more question here.

I have a Ph.D in molecular biology and masters in health care administration. What career path would Booz Allen have and who would be the person to discuss that role?

I'm going to open that up to all of our panelists here. And JC, I believe we have some resources to kind of reach out and get routed from recruiting.

What I want to ask back. Thank you for joining us. What do you want to do? Right? A lot of the recruiting that we do at Booz Allen is around the candidates. So when we call you and talk to you about your path, we're going to understand what your skills are, some of your goals and interests.

My job as a recruiter is to socialize with Elliot, Chandra, and Katie and find out—look at this resumé. What type of background do you see? What type of investment is Booz Allen making? What kind of work do we see on the forefront that this candidate could be aligned to.

The main thing is to understand what you want to do. I think there's a place for a lot of people here at Booz Allen.

All the questions are good questions we have a good candidate pool to choose from. When we get you through the screening stage, we know who to route you to.

Should we send you over to the VA and  people supporting this system integration or should we send you over to our traumatic brain researchers that are looking to do some of that work?

Really understanding what your passion is is how you can best resource for yourself and getting through the interviewing process at Booz Allen.

Elliot: Awesome, thank you. We have time for one more question here. It's to all of us but I don't think all of us will have a chance to respond to this one. Meaghan, if I can pass this over to you. How do you stay on top of the knowledge within your area of expertise?

Meaghan: There were a couple of different ways. One of them within the organization, there's so many different types of people and so many different educational backgrounds. Half the time I can reach out to a colleague or someone and say, hey, I have this problem. Who can you connect me up with and talk to about it?

For example, I had an issue with reading and documentation, and I was connected withsomeone in the SIG and then through talking with them, we were able to learn like, okay, there is al this new technology out there. So there's that way, and there's also training opportunities. Just the other day there was a training on all of the different trainings out there. Just get a feel for what's going on because these fields do change so much and they change so quickly. It definitely is hard to keep on top of. But I say between Booz Allen putting it out there and offering trainings and a lot of opportunities as well as again reaching out and networking with people and kind of seeing what everyone else is working on. I think those are the two main ways that I usually find out or keep on top of everything.

All right. Thank you, Meaghan, and thank you to all of our panelists and thank you to all the folks who have attended today and asked such great questions here. I think we are just about out of time. I'm actually going to hand it over to Tiffany to close us out today.

Tiffany: All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you to all our panelists for supporting our Destination Booz Allen this month. Thank you to those who joined on the line. I know we didn't get to every question, but feel free to reach out and connect with us on our socials that are here on the screen. We look forward to you joining a future Destination Booz Allen. Thank you, everyone.