Jennifer Lang: A Five-Decade Career Spent ‘Outside the Beltway’

When Jennifer Lang graduated college in 1973, it was “a bad year for liberal arts majors,” she says now.

Having no luck finding a job in her field, she was “happy to accept an offer from the government agency where I’d spent three summers and my senior year of college working part-time,” says Lang, who earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Maryland.

That government agency was the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Lang’s one-year stretch as a personnel specialist there marked the start of what would become a nearly 40-year career in public service, before her retirement in 2013. (Lang considers herself to currently be a “fractional volunteer” in HR and business counseling activities.)

The public sector was a natural place for the Washington, D.C. native to get her start, says Lang, adding that she was always drawn to the “the variety of experiences” the HR field provides.

“My love of ‘operations’ activities in which I was directly connected to the ‘real work’ that government delivers to the public prompted my journey outside the beltway,” she continues.

“I never thought I would retire from a public service position; always thinking I would move on the private sector. However, as I started to consider my opportunities and experiences as ‘adventures,’ I never looked back until it was time to retire from an amazing public sector career.”

She spent most of that five decade-career “outside the Beltway, working in operational positions in four federal regions, seven federal agencies and two stints in D.C.0-headquartered functions,” says Lang, who went on to earn a master’s in business administration from Regis University in 2007.

Indeed, Lang’s resume also includes her experience as a classification and staffing specialist with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service office in Boston, and HR generalist positions in personnel operations and the headquarters’ policy offices with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Boston and Washington, D.C.

While serving as HR director for the Dallas/Denver region of the U.S. Department of Labor in 1995, Lang was tasked with consolidating two regional HR activities with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Four years later, she relocated to Chicago to take a role as human resources director for the largest region of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Lang spent the last 10 years of her career (2003 – 2013) as director of the director of the Center of Human Resources in the Chicago Regional Office of the U.S. Social Security Administration.

Looking back on her career, Lang is most proud of her leadership accomplishments, “particularly those in which I managed drastic change, as well as those in which I developed new leaders.”

Lang has been a PSHRA member for the bulk of her public sector career (and beyond), and continues to take advantage of the resources that she sought when first joining the organization.

“I wanted to interact with other public sector HR professionals, and later in my career, with HR managers and executives,” says Lang, who also served on PSHRA’s Executive Council from 2007 to 2011.

“The training and conferences that PSHRA offered are great networking opportunities, but are also learning experiences that weren’t and still are not offered anywhere else,” she adds.

“PSHRA connections have continued to be my lifeline throughout all of my leadership experiences, providing me with friendships, connections and mentors that are unparalleled in the field.”