Former longtime Food and Drug Administration officials who are now employed in the public sector are urging others who have recently left the agency due to a Reduction in Force (RIF) or are considering leaving because of the ongoing, longest government shutdown in US history (or other reason) to embrace their FDA knowledge as they look for new roles outside the agency.
“I see great value to FDA having more people with industry experience in it, just like I see great value to industry having more people with FDA experience in it,” says Sean Boyd, who was a top FDA official for more than three decades before joining QualityHub as Corporate VP earlier this year. (Related Story: “RIF’d FDA: 4 Tips for Ex-Agency Staffers, Industry as US Gov’t Employees Search for New Roles,” QualityHub, Oct. 23, 2025.)
“I loved the career that I had with the government for 31 years … but during my job search [pre-QualityHub], I couldn’t say I had experience in the medical devices industry,” he said, recommending that job seekers “frame their experience using business terminology.”
When applicants do that, “it expresses that you understand what that public company is looking for and that you’ve done something similar while working within the government. It’s about making sure they understand that your skills within the agency can translate,” Boyd said.
“One of the pieces of advice I have is, don’t settle. You will eventually find what you’re looking for.” – Sean Boyd
Kim Trautman, a former FDA official who is currently a board member for the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS) and an independent consultant, agreed with Boyd’s assessment.
“Those of us in a quality or regulatory function do a terrible job of using financial terms, because government employees … don’t think about, ‘What’s the value of this PMA [Premarket Approval for medical devices] or NDA [New Drug Application]?’” Trautman said. “But if you say, ‘In my experience at FDA, I managed “X” for the applicant and it was a $3.2M product launch’ – well, now you’re starting to talk their language of dollars, product launch, and understanding timelines.”
Private sector companies “are going to look for that,” she added. “They’ll want to know how well you’re going to transition and whether you’re going to be able to transition into more of that business-type acumen. Because these companies know that most government folk aren’t traditionally very business savvy when it comes to budgeting and other related things. So, think about how you can take your FDA experiences and ‘monetize’ them,” per se, so government experience will be deemed more valuable.
“The more you can pull from both the science and the business acumen, that starts making you more attractive as a candidate, because industry will say, ‘OK, this person can likely transition to industry even if they don’t have industry experience, or have little industry experience. It appears they can talk our language and they can transition,” Trautman said.
‘Don’t Settle,’ QHub’s Sean Boyd Says
Further, QualityHub‘s Boyd suggests that job seekers not be overly concerned about their FDA experience “becoming stale” if they once worked at the agency but months or years have passed since they left.
“If you’re getting further and further away from that transition, layering on additional experience from an industry or other perspective will help amplify your value, because that will mean you have FDA and industry experience and you’ll learn how to knit all that together and apply it in effective ways” in a new role in the public sector, Boyd said.
While he encourages everyone to land their “dream job,” he recognizes that job hunters might have to take on different roles on their way to such a position.
Nevertheless, “one of the pieces of advice I have is, don’t settle,” Boyd said. “You will eventually find what you’re looking for. But it’s a thought process you must go through – if you don’t have industry experience and there’s a gap on your resume, then how do you get that experience? Where do you find that next position that will allow you to continue to advance?”
The good news for those who left the FDA some time ago is that “possessing regulatory intelligence is never going to get old,” former agency official Trautman says.
“As long as you are working in any way, shape, or form – even in semi-retirement – your regulatory intelligence is going to be important,” she added. “You may not feel like you have that first-hand knowledge, but constantly staying in touch with trade press and what’s going on … and making sure that you keep that regulatory intelligence is still very, very important.”
Trautman also urges job hunters to think outside the box. For example, those who worked in a quality-related role at the FDA could, in the public sector, work in positions that deal in Quality Management Systems (QMS), compliance remediation, risk management, and more.
“Don’t think you have to stay on one path,” she said, noting that it’s necessary “for you to know what you don’t like or want to do as it is to know what you enjoy and want to do.”
Jewell Martin, Director of US regulatory policy at BioMarin Pharmaceutical, agreed that “finding out what you don’t like is just as important as finding out what you do like.”
“That’s a lesson in itself,” said Martin, who left the FDA in 2020 when she was Staff Director for the Office of New Drugs (OND) within the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). When a job seeker knows what they don’t want to do, they can “cross those types of positions off the list and they don’t have to include that in their search anymore.”
She went on: “Like Sean [Boyd] says, don’t settle for something that you know you don’t want. But if you still have some time left to work before retirement, that does give you the time to try different things and make changes as needed.”
Comments from Martin, Boyd, and Trautman came during RAPS Convergence 2025 in Pittsburgh.