Posted on Aug 25, 2019
Is 35P or 35M a better MOS for post-Army career opportunities with Intelligence Agencies and/or Government Contractors?
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I am thinking about enlisting in the Army as either a 35P or 35M. I have been interested in Military Intelligence and the IC since I was young, and it is my ultimate goal to work in that field for an agency one day. My background is clean and I am willing to work my ass off to achieve my goals. Both 35M and 35P are attractive MOSs to me. I like the language training aspect that seems to be guaranteed with 35P, but I also like the idea of being able to go outside the wire and conduct HUMINT collection as a 35M. However, I've heard that sometimes 35Ms are stuck doing crappy jobs when not deployed, and that 35Ps spend most of their time at a computer translating (I've heard differently for SF attached soldiers). I've also heard that making the jump to 35L or even Warrant Officer can be beneficial in the long run as well. Which MOS would provide the best setup for post-Army employment? Thank you for your time.
Intelligence
35M: Human Intelligence Collector
35P: Cryptologic Linguist
Posted 5 y ago
Responses: 3
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Really depends on what kind of language, but if you get a Cat 4 language (Arabic, Chinese, etc), your expected worth outside the Army will be much greater than 35M by far. Why? The demand is much higher for that language skill set because they are harder to find. If you just get something like Spanish, German, or French, that difference begins to equalize. Everyone who goes 35M thinks it’s all outside the wire James Bond stuff. You won’t get much into tradecraft juicy stuff until you get into senior NCO / Warrant Officer ranks. As for 35P, I did that for seven years before I commissioned and there were plenty of outside / inside the wire times. Sure there are many jobs were you “sit behind a computer” but there’s plenty of jobs where you are on teams out there supporting the infantry. You don’t need to go SOF for that.
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(Join to see)
Thank you for the response, sir. If you could do it again, is there anything you'd do differently as a 35P? I'm just trying to see what different paths are available. Again, thank you sir.
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MAJ (Join to see)
(Join to see) That’s a hard question to answer and not sure where you are going with it. You don’t control your destiny when you get by DLI and Goodfellow. You don’t even get to put in an assignment preference. I suppose what I could say is I wish I didn’t spend so much time in Aerial Exploitation and spent more time in LLVI / Prophet teams. I spent very little time doing that stuff, mainly training in it. I never got to do it deployed either. But like I said, until you are an NCO, the Army controls that. Even then, Branch was telling me at Staff Sergeant that I had the choice to either go recruiter or Drill Sergeant. I said no to both and went to OCS.
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Unless they changed things AGAIN 35M is back to being langiage dependent, which means you get a language with that MOS as well.
Both have equal potential post-Army. However 35Ps by their nature have an affiliation with NSA (for good or ill) inherent in what they do. 35Ms MAY acquire similar affiliations, but it is not near as likely as 35Ps. The flip side is the 35M has a little bit wider field post-Army. While both skillets, as practiced, can never be used in a civilian capacity, the 35M skillset is a bit easier to adapt IN PART to civilian tasks (build rapport, negotiate, apply psychology).
Both have equal potential post-Army. However 35Ps by their nature have an affiliation with NSA (for good or ill) inherent in what they do. 35Ms MAY acquire similar affiliations, but it is not near as likely as 35Ps. The flip side is the 35M has a little bit wider field post-Army. While both skillets, as practiced, can never be used in a civilian capacity, the 35M skillset is a bit easier to adapt IN PART to civilian tasks (build rapport, negotiate, apply psychology).
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(Join to see)
Thank you SFC O'Malley. I am leaning towards 35M at the moment, but would not want to put myself in a situation where any experience from the MOS would be useless come civilian life.
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SGT Justin Chiang
I've seen 35M's continue on as HUMINTers for civilian agencies, be cops, analysts, air traffic controllers, dance teachers, and literally everything in between. You pick up a lot of skills, regardless of MOS, as you serve. How you use them after you hang up the uniform is entirely up to you.
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Both MOS have good prospects outside the military, largely due to the fact that government intelligence agencies do a lot of there own on sight training, and will likely be extremely different then what you are currently doing in the army. With that said all government agencies will place hiring priority on applicants who have language fluency in “critical languages”. I would also like to point out that all government intelligence agencies require a 4 year degree with a minimum of a 3.0.
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