A chance encounter at a job fair just over ten years ago led Thomas (Tommy) Worden to the USPTO, and he hasn’t looked back since. One of the agency’s 868 military veterans, Tommy now serves as a primary examiner with a focus on mechanical engineering and says “it was the best career decision [he] ever made.”
A graduate of Cornell University in Ithaca, Tommy studied civil and mechanical engineering with an additional concentration in architecture under a U.S. Air Force Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship. During Tommy’s nine years on active duty as a civil engineering officer, he spent half his assignments overseas, serving in Afghanistan, Korea, and Qatar. He also earned a Master of Science in engineering management with a concentration in information technology before medically retiring from Air Force service in 2013.
Tommy attended a job fair while awaiting a potential medical retirement and ended up at a USPTO recruitment table, talking to the team about careers and benefits.
“Everyone representing the USPTO at that job fair just radiated appreciation, kindness, excitement, and confidence,” he says. He left excited about the agency and when he transitioned out of the Air Force, he was happy to be able to join an agency with “great support for agency veterans.”
“This job has changed my life,” says Tommy. “The USPTO is a place where I immediately started to appreciate so many different physical, mental, and cultural differences between what I was used to in military service and what became my future in the civil service.”
Those differences include everything from a remote, flexible schedule to non-competitive promotions.
“I can work from home and have a flexible work schedule that allows me to optionally ‘flex’ around certain appointments,” he says. “My family and I now have so much more stability, flexibility, and overall job satisfaction.”
Tommy says the promotion potential also contributed to that job satisfaction.
“Another aspect of the USPTO that was refreshingly different than my experience with the military was the opportunity for growth and how to achieve it,” he says. “In the military, you are rarely fully autonomous, and your peers are your competition. At the USPTO, you can rapidly promote based only on your results, and all your peers can achieve the same.” Tommy says that, as a result, the work environment is one of collaboration, rather than competition.
Tommy appreciates the agency’s welcoming and inclusive atmosphere, embodied by numerous affinity groups, like the USPTO Military Association. He emphasizes that the commitment to employee success and well-being have made a difference in his life: “I simply love being in an agency where everyone is rooting for everyone around them to succeed.”
An agency advocate, Tommy was a featured veteran in Search and Employ magazine this summer and says he is grateful to help other veterans transition to civil service in the USPTO.