Flyhound
Pre-takeoff checklist
I started my career in the private sector, moved to federal service for 30 years and am now back in the private sector. All of my federal service was in jobs that required a security clearance. When managers in that line of work wanted to get rid of someone they would find a security violation and pull the person's security clearance. Without the clearance you can't hold the job so you were escorted off the job site immediately and that was that. As far as time between promotions in the government sector, Mason and Fearless Tower hit the nail on the head - it depends. I spent 8 years as a GS-12, slowly working my way through the steps in that grade. When I finally made GS-13 as a nuclear engineer at a naval shipyard, I decided advancement opportunity and new experiences were more important than the very interesting work I was doing at the Shipyard. Some areas of federal work expand rapidly while others are very static. The workload in the shipyard was fairly constant, so advancement opportunities didn't come along very often. Being willing to accept major changes in your life opens more doors. I went where the work was expanding (nuclear waste cleanup) and was able to move from a GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 and finally into the Senior Executive Service over the same 8 year timeframe I spent as a GS-12. That second 8 years involved major changes in geography, additional training I obtained on my own, and steep learning curves in new lines of responsibility. You just have to decide what is more important in your life. If you enjoy your work, don't like the upheaval that comes with major change, then don't worry about advancement potential and just do your job. If change is more interesting than upsetting to you and you like new challenges, then advancement opportunities abound. Now that I'm back in the private sector, I find the same constraints apply. In my experience, neither career path offers significantly different opportunities for a given perspective on dealing with change.