How hard is it to go from National Guard to active duty?

MAJ Javier Rivera - Absolutely. I've always understood that the Guard makes a significant investment in each soldier and they want their money back.
It's easy to fall into the lifestyle of the Army in Basic and AIT. If they had ask me when I got out of OSUT, I would have stayed Active. I was offered Active out of IOBC (one of the top four students, three way tie for number two and only two points between number two and number one), but the Guard was not being cooperative and I didn't push it at that point.
OTOH, in the Infantry and Engineer units I was associated with during my Guard time, schools, additional duties, CAP projects and Keep Up's were pretty common and if you had an employer that would (or had to) put up with it, you could spend a lot of time on duty. I averaged 70-90 days a year on duty, including IDT's once I commissioned and I had NCO's in my company that were doing close to that number.

MAJ Javier Rivera - and I think a lot of Guardsmen (and women) do themselves a disservice by not pursuing the additional opportunities that are offered in most units, although I am aware that some units are bad about letting the troops know what is out there. As an Engineer, and some of this was not restricted to Engineers, there was a surprising amount of State Active Duty time available in addition to schools and Federal duty. We did everything from Domestic Action Programs, read engineering projects for entities or locations too poor to afford private contractors, to pot sweeps, to fire duty. We usually offered these to the guys we knew were not working, my units bein

Agreed with you CPT Lawrence Cable. Nevertheless, that suits some folks but not all. Many (again not all) would like a chance at skills training (airborne, Ranger, air assault, pathfinder, etc...) and be assigned those duties. Had many soldiers who transferred from both NG and a Reserves due to their organization lack of support for those. Hell, my first 2 years were as a drilling reservist fresh out of high school. Any training besides NCOES or MOS was non existent, period! Hence why I went regular army. No regrets!!!!!

MAJ Javier Rivera - The Army Guard, with the combat units anyway, were freeing up funds for badge schools by the time I got out. Airborne was still a hard one, but Air Assault, Pathfinder on occasions, and even a few Ranger slots, depending on the unit and your round out. But we has Sapper slots that went unfilled and a lot of those additional duty training slots were hard to fill. OTOH, we seldom had trouble finding bodies for the Civil Action Programs in Central America, or the Keep Ups in Europe.
One of the stupidest things I did in the Guard was to turn down a two year tour in Panama. I had some good reasons not to at the time, but hindsight says it would have been better to take it.

Thank you for responding

LTC David Brown - if an applicant is prior service or RC transferring to the AC the recruiter may not have the MOS option she wants or desires. The options are restricted and it is not the recruiter playing hard to get. If you look at the other posts on RP talking about DD368s, conditional release, transfer national guard to actively Duty using the search box you see this and their experiences going back to AD. The recruiter is the point of entry and the source of current information. I know this makes people nervous, but there it is.

LTC Jason Mackay - Thank you for responding!

Thank you