HX5’s Margarita Howard Explains the Value of Mission Alignment
Not every civilian job lets veterans keep doing work that resembles their military service. At HX5, CEO Margarita Howard argues that mission alignment is exactly what keeps former service members engaged after they leave the Air Force, Army, Navy, or Marine Corps.
HX5’s contracts include advanced weapons research, production readiness reviews for sensor systems, and modeling and simulation for defense and space programs. An engineer who worked on similar systems in uniform can often step into comparable projects at HX5, just approached from the contractor’s side of the relationship instead of the government’s.
More Than a Paycheck
Howard, a service-disabled veteran herself, describes the appeal directly. “The work we do is very exciting. Some of it is not being done anywhere else in the world,” she says, framing meaningful work as being as important as compensation when it comes to retaining veteran talent.
That philosophy runs through HX5’s participation in the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship Program, where the company has hosted eight fellows since 2021 at a steady rate of two per year. Fellows spend twelve weeks split between project work and professional development, gaining exposure to HX5’s mission work across defense and NASA contracts.
A Company Built on the Same Values
HX5 operates as a service-disabled veteran-owned and women-owned small business across more than 70 government locations. Howard sees the company’s emphasis on mission focus and accountability as a natural extension of military culture, one that lets veterans lean on habits they already built in uniform rather than starting over from scratch in a new professional identity.
That overlap between military and company values also shapes how HX5 talks about its work internally. Rather than framing contracts purely in terms of deliverables and deadlines, Howard’s team connects daily tasks back to the missions they support, whether that means NASA research or defense modeling. For veterans accustomed to understanding their work in terms of mission outcomes, that framing can make the shift from active duty to contractor life feel less like a career change and more like a continuation. Refer to this article for additional information.
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