Fire Control Technician

If you held the FT rating, you ran the brains of the boat's weapons fight. Fire Control Technicians operate and maintain the submarine Combat Control System (CCS), the Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical System (SWFTS), Over-the-Horizon targeting, and the fire-control consoles that turn a sonar contact into a firing solution for a torpedo or a Tomahawk. This is software-driven combat systems work: building target motion analysis, maintaining tactical computers and their peripherals, troubleshooting digital electronics at sea with no depot to send a board to, and keeping a weapons-control suite mission-ready inside a steel hull.

The pipeline is real engineering. After boot camp you completed Basic Enlisted Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, then Class "A" school and the FT specialty pipeline (roughly 18 to 24 weeks) covering electronics fundamentals, mathematics, computer theory, and fire-control systems, followed by platform "C" schools for Virginia-class, Los Angeles-class, or Ohio-class boats. The ASVAB bar is one of the highest in the Navy (line scores around AR+MK+EI+GS: 222), and the rating requires U.S. citizenship and security-clearance eligibility. That combination, advanced electronics plus a clearance plus disciplined documentation, is exactly what defense and high-reliability employers screen for.

This page is for the FT who is getting out and wants to know what that experience is actually worth on the outside. Your combat-systems electronics background is highly transferable, but only if the resume translates it out of Navy jargon. A surface-fleet equivalent exists in the FC Fire Controlman rating, and the closest same-boat ratings are the STS Sonar Technician (Submarine) and the ET Electronics Technician. Start mapping your skills with the military career crosswalk.

My own transition stalled for 18 months of silent applications after the Navy. The work was never the problem. The way I described it was. FTs get bitten by this harder than almost anyone, because "submarine fire control" reads like a weapons job to a civilian recruiter when it is really advanced electronics, software-driven systems, and troubleshooting under pressure. Translate it right and the same experience that ran a combat control system runs a calibration lab or a nuclear control room. That translation is what costs callbacks, not your skill set. — Brad Tachi, Navy Diver veteran & BMR founder

The most direct civilian matches for FTs sit in electronics and instrumentation technician roles, where your hands-on troubleshooting of digital systems transfers almost without retraining. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program is the source for every salary below.

Electrical and electronic engineering technologists and technicians (BLS, May 2024) had a median wage of $77,180. This is the closest one-to-one to console maintenance and systems test work. Avionics technicians sit even higher at a $81,390 median (BLS, May 2024), and aerospace and defense employers actively recruit submarine electronics backgrounds for them. Calibration technologists and technicians had a $65,040 median (BLS, May 2024), a strong fit for anyone who lived in test equipment and precision measurement aboard the boat.

Field service and commercial-industrial repair is another live lane. Electrical and electronics installers and repairers had a $71,270 median (BLS OOH, May 2024), covering field service engineers who install and maintain complex electronic systems at customer sites. Defense primes that build combat and weapons-control systems, the same hardware lineage you maintained, hire heavily into integration, test, and depot roles.

Be honest with yourself about geography. The richest concentration of defense electronics work clusters around shipyards and primes: Groton and the Connecticut shoreline, Hampton Roads, Newport News, San Diego, Kings Bay, and the Puget Sound. Calibration and field-service roles are more evenly spread because every manufacturer needs them. If you are open to relocating toward a defense corridor, your clearance plus combat-systems pedigree is a genuine premium. For a broader pay comparison across ratings, see what your MOS is worth in civilian salary data, and the same combat-systems employers also recruit Air Force avionics test-station technicians. When you are ready to put it on paper, the military resume builder structures the bullets, or you can build your resume now.

Federal service rewards the FT skill set in a way the private market sometimes misses, because the government already speaks the language of systems, configuration management, and documented maintenance. The strongest target is the GS-0856 Electronics Technician series, which maps directly to console and combat-systems maintenance. Transitioning FTs with solid documentation commonly qualify at GS-7 through GS-11 depending on watch-station qualifications and supervisory time.

The GS-0802 Engineering Technician series fits test, integration, and in-service engineering support at NUWC Newport, NUWC Keyport, and the regional maintenance centers. For sailors who leaned into the software and tactical-computer side of SWFTS, the GS-2210 Information Technology Management series and the GS-0854 Computer Engineering series open systems-administration and embedded-systems roles. The GS-0855 Electronics Engineering series is reachable with an engineering degree, and several FTs use tuition assistance and the GI Bill to bridge into it. Quality and configuration backgrounds map to the GS-1910 Quality Assurance series at shipyards and depots.

Veterans' Preference adds 5 or 10 points to your rated score and, for many positions, lets you compete under special hiring authorities such as VEOA and VRA. The catch is that USAJobs resumes are graded against the published qualification standard line by line, so a private-sector one-pager will sink your application. Detail every system, every grade of maintenance, and every watch qualification. The federal resume builder is built for that length and structure, and ratings that share these series, including the ET Electronics Technician and the ITS Information Systems Technician (Submarine), compete for the same billets. New to USAJobs? Start by reading how your clearance status carries after separation, then start your federal resume.

If you are staying in electronics, instrumentation, or defense systems, your terminology already translates. Calibration labs, avionics shops, and defense integrators use words like "fault isolation" and "configuration item" every day. This section is for FTs targeting careers OUTSIDE combat-systems electronics, where a hiring manager has never heard of SWFTS and will not look it up.

The goal is to keep the substance and drop the acronym. A recruiter for a hospital's biomedical department or a manufacturer's maintenance team needs to see measurable systems work, not a Navy weapons billet.

Before: "Operated and maintained submarine Combat Control System and SWFTS, performed organizational and intermediate-level maintenance on fire-control consoles."

After (for a biomedical or industrial controls role): "Maintained a networked, software-driven control system valued in the tens of millions, performing tiered preventive and corrective maintenance and isolating faults to the component level with zero depot support, sustaining 99%+ system availability."

For more before-and-after patterns, see the 50 military terms translated to civilian language and hidden military skills civilians do not know you have. The military resume builder applies this translation automatically, or you can build your resume now.