Motivated self-starter. Successful executive. Intelligent engineer.
All of these words describe Natalie Givans, MA ’89. As a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton she directs the work of 1,800 people on the firm’s Assurance and Resilience Capability team and is responsible for more than $300 million in annual sales.
Givans has spent her entire 24-year career with the company, working her way up from an entry-level consulting engineer. “I originally took the job at Booz Allen because it was not just a technical job but was also an opportunity to interact with government buyers and integrate service offerings, and to learn about people management and marketing skills and about business development,” she says.
With a freshly inked bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her first project was subcontracting with a company that integrated a system providing secure connections over desktop telephones. While separate vendors built the actual phones, her role supported the development of the device’s signaling plan.
“The signaling plan was the heart and soul of the project,” she says. “We were figuring out how device A talked to device B, securely. That was my first project and I was immediately trusted and respected in a technological position. How exciting is that-to be 21 years old, just graduated, and trusted by these senior people?” she says. “Additionally, I was often the only woman in the room. It was a little intimidating at times, but I learned I could hold my own.”
It was not long before Givans, who had constantly juggled multiple jobs as an undergraduate, discovered that full-time employment left her with enough spare time to tackle graduate school. Just six months after joining Booz Allen, she began evening courses in electrical engineering in what is now the Whiting School’s Engineering for Professionals (EP).
“Because I knew what I was doing with my life, I could focus my education around it,” she says. She especially enjoyed the program’s flexibility, the teamwork, and the applied nature of her course work. “The timing was perfect,” she says, noting that the topics she learned in class, such as using CAD programs that ran traffic signals, dovetailed seamlessly with the work she was doing with signaling and communications plans.
Meanwhile, at Booz Allen, she was quickly rising through the ranks. She had joined the firm with a group of about 30 others under the umbrella of Communications Security. “It was sort of an experiment on their part to see if they could hire engineers and train them for the various aspects of consulting,” she says. “Obviously, it worked.”
“As my role grew, I brought on junior staff, developed a team, and became an expert at pro tocols and security considerations for devices, such as voice coders and encryption.” All of this occurred at the time when communications security began to merge with computer security. “What resulted, sometime between 1987 and 1990, was Information Security, the genesis of IT Security, Information Assurance, and cyber security,” she explains. “Early on, I had a sense that all of this was important, and Booz Allen did too.”
Today, as leader of the firm’s 1,800-member Assurance and Resilience Capability team, Givans travels all over the world. She explains the goal of her team’s work succinctly: “Assurance is making sure that the customer’s mission is able to proceed in any degraded situation, from a hacker to a natural disaster. Resilience is the ability to recover and operate as quickly as possible after such an incident and to resume that mission.”
As a leader, Givans firmly believes that “you need to build the next generation behind you, so that you can continue to grow yourself; to coach and mentor so you can continue to lead and have more impact.”
She also attributes much of her success to her family: husband, Charlie; her 20-year-old twins, Samantha and Andrew; and her 8-yearold son, Zane. “Family added a critical dimension to my ability to do my job,” she says. “I used to be willing to be a workaholic, but I have learned to better prioritize time and gauge what’s really important.”
Not one to waste “spare time,” Givans also serves as the vice chair for the Armed Forces Communications Electronics Association, supports the Corporate Partnership Council of the Society of Women Engineers, and serves on the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital region Women’s Advisory Board.
“It’s extremely important to get girls involved with and excited about engineering,” she says. “I have a mission to get more women into this field and keep them in it.”
By anyone’s measure, Givans sets a fine example.