The question in that WashingtonExec headline is the right one, but the article itself didn’t load for me—just a security checkpoint. Still worth addressing, because I hear versions of it in every retained engagement we run right now.
The technologies reshaping delivery teams aren’t the ones getting keynote slots at conferences. They’re the orchestration layers, the policy-as-code frameworks, the zero-trust tooling that finally works at scale, and the AI-assisted development environments that cleared engineers are actually using daily. The executives we place understand that adoption happens quietly, in sprints and pull requests, not in transformation roadmaps. If you’re mapping talent for a mission system modernization, you’re looking for people who’ve run delivery teams through that shift—not just sponsored it.
The tradeoff: these capabilities don’t show up cleanly on a résumé. A passive candidate with a TS/SCI and hands-on experience embedding security in CI/CD pipelines is harder to surface than someone with a tidy list of certs. That’s the work.