Thousands of US government employees were handed pink slips this year following a Reduction in Force (RIF), sending many – including those who worked at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – on an unexpected journey to find new roles in the private sector.
At RAPS Convergence 2025 in Pittsburgh this month, four former FDA officials sat down with ex-agency staffers and others for a frank discussion around how they can take first steps toward finding meaningful and lucrative new jobs outside the government.
Below are two tips that aim to help ex-FDAers land on their feet post-RIF, and two tips for the MedTech and pharma industries as they interact with employees who remain at the agency and are now wearing multiple job hats.
Tip No. 1 for Ex-FDA: Don’t Ignore Value of Social Networking
When QualityHub Corporate VP Sean Boyd left the FDA’s employ earlier this year after a 31-year stint in various agency roles, he found himself in the dark – social media dark, that is.
During the many years he spent at the FDA, “I had social media accounts, but I never looked at them and never posted anything during my entire career at the agency. Looking back, I wish I had not waited so long to engage and only did it when I started my job search, because I didn’t know how to get in touch with people who had already left the FDA. I didn’t have their personal email or their new work email or any other ways to contact them.”
That’s when Boyd began using LinkedIn to find and communicate with professionals he previously worked with at the agency.
“I had connections in-house that knew of people, and I used that process to build the network of people that I was going to initially talk with. And now I’m on LinkedIn every day. It’s a complete transformation of how I perceive the value of networking,” he said.
As Boyd became more comfortable using a tool like LinkedIn, his conversations with connections evolved over time.
“Initially, I would ask, ‘I’m looking for something. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m an office director at the FDA.
What’s the equivalent position in industry and consulting? Is there something in academia that I might consider doing?’ And because I had an emergency preparedness and response background, I was also exploring opportunities within that. That’s how my conversations started: What am I looking for? Where should I look for it? And then over time, they evolved.”
Keeping options open was also key to Boyd’s post-FDA success.
“I didn’t narrow myself down to a single type of search,” he said. “I was looking for something in the consulting industry, or something in medical device manufacturing, quality, or regulatory at an executive senior level – that was the scope of my search. And then I would tailor how I can contribute to that role depending on the company or the individual I was talking with.”
Boyd’s conversations with his network then morphed from exploratory-type talks to chats that were more pointed, during which he refined his pitch and laser-focused on unique skills and expertise he possessed.
“My conversations evolved from exploration to defining my pitch and what I have to offer that’s unique from any other candidate they’re going to consider, and then I kept giving out my contact information,” he said. “So that’s how my conversations evolved up until the point that I was entertaining opportunities with different companies.”
Mike Ryan, a VP at Eliquent, added that networking is more important than ever before because jobseekers nowadays find new roles via contacts they already know.
“There’s a great community of people out there around what we do, around regulatory affairs, around quality assurance, and people who have worked at the FDA and have already made the transition to the private sector, and people who never worked at the FDA but worked with the FDA,” said Ryan, a nearly 22-year agency veteran who left his position in July as deputy director of the Office of Regulatory Programs within the FDA’s medical device center.
“We all speak a similar language and at the end of the day we’re all trying to get good products to patients who need them,” he said. “What I’ve found is, that community has been very open to talking with and helping people who are looking for jobs. I started out by talking to people I knew, who connected me to people they knew, who in turn connected me to even more people. Soon I was talking to people I’d never heard of … who were incredibly helpful in offering their advice, offering their stories about what they’ve gone through during their post-FDA journey, and how they found their new jobs, and whatever other information they had to share.”
Ryan previously found social networking to be an uncomfortable experience, describing it as a “four-letter word.” But now he understands its value and says it’s “rewarding.”
“What I figured out quickly was that everybody was willing to help, but it was hard for people to help if they didn’t know what type of role I wanted, so I had to figure that out first,” he said. “I had to do recon and intelligence gathering to figure out what I was even talking about, what I wanted to ask about. And then there was the second wave of, now I have an idea of what I want, so I can have more informed conversations and go back to people I’ve already talked to so they could connect to me to others and move my job search further along.”
Tip No. 2 for Ex-FDA: Embrace Critical-Thinking Skills
People who have worked at the FDA bring unique skills and “have far more value than they probably realize,” said Kim Trautman, who left the agency several years ago and is a current board member for the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS).
Former FDA staffers, she said, “have exceptional critical thinking skills. That’s just something that is taken for granted. Things are never black and white. We must use critical-thinking skills and benefit-risk, no matter what commodity industry. Because of the public health mission that the FDA has, you are bringing some excellent culture and critical thinking skills to a manufacturer or another consulting company, regardless of the specific role that you do.”
No matter the career path that a former FDA official travels, keeping public health and a quality culture top-of-mind should continue to be a North Star.
“What you have to offer any employer is that you are public-health focused,” Trautman told ex-FDAers. “You’re critical thinkers, you’re problem solvers in a technical field, and you don’t realize that your background gives you so much more experience that you can draw on now that you’ve left.”
Tip No. 1 for Industry: Talk to FDA, ‘Give Grace’
Because of the many staff changes occurring within the agency, it’s vital for manufacturers to “give grace” with respect to expectations, timelines, and responsiveness, QualityHub’s Boyd says.
“One of the important recommendations we’re making is communicate, reach out, and talk with the people that you were interacting with before at the agency, and ask them, ‘How are things? Is it the same team? Have you lost any resources? Is there anything we can do to make whatever type of review more streamlined?'” he advised.
“The people at the agency are fully dedicated to the mission – that has not changed, that will not change,” Boyd added. “They’re going to still serve their customers – the medical product industry – as well as patients, and meet expectations, whether it’s a timeline related to a user-fee commitment or just getting you the information that you need when you need it.”
Tip No. 2 for Industry: Educate Employees About FDA
Meanwhile, consultant Ryan recognizes that most people who have never worked at the FDA oftentimes don’t understand how the agency works and should be educated about its processes and inner workings.
“Even in the best of times it’s difficult for the FDA to put out guidances on everything that really need guidances and it’s going to be even harder to do that in the coming years,” he said. “And to the extent that we can help educate people about what the FDA is and what they do, I think that’s full service that former FDA staffers can provide.”
Jewell Martin, director of US regulatory policy at BioMarin Pharmaceutical, pointed out that many people consider the FDA to be a “black hole” that isn’t made up of flesh-and-blood humans.
“The FDA is full of people, just like companies are. One of the things I’m able to help with is explaining to my industry colleagues that agency staffers are people too. Just interact normally,” said Martin, who in 2020 left the agency where she was staff director for the Office of New Drugs (OND).
It wasn’t until parting ways with the FDA that she realized the extent to which outsiders didn’t understand what happens within the FDA’s various commodity centers – but she doesn’t fault them.
After all, “how would they know? I took for granted that they wouldn’t know – they wouldn’t know that it’s this office versus that office, or this needs a guidance, or whatever it may be,” Martin said. “So having the ability to support the FDA in that way and explaining to colleagues external to the FDA who have never worked at the FDA how things really work and what is really going on is meaningful.”