Department of Defense Announces SpouseWorks
The Department of Defense established the Spouse Education and Career Opportunities (SECO) program to provide military spouses a network for “career readiness.”
Department of Defense Announces SpouseWorks
Over the years, aspects of SECO, such as the My Career Advancement Account (MyCAA) scholarship, have grown to provide financial relief for junior spouses pursuing technical fields. The program has evolved since it began in 2007, and in 2026, it changed once more, rebranded as “SpouseWorks.”
This has not changed the benefits offered under SECO. Instead, it unified separate scholarships, job recruitment pipelines, and coaching assets into a single resource. There are organizational and cosmetic changes, but the benefits remain the same at press time.
One important feature of the program is providing military spouses with access to professional career coaches through Military OneSource. You can use this resource to translate employment histories into civilian resumes.
Spouses can schedule sessions to map out goals, practice with video mock interviews, polish digital marketing strategies, and interpret career assessments. For spouses interested in launching a business, coaches use tools such as the Entrepreneur EDGE assessment to assess business viability.
SpouseWorks Scholarship
For spouses entering high-growth fields, the platform runs the SpouseWorks Scholarship, which preserves the benefits of the legacy MyCAA program, providing up to $4,000 in total tuition assistance, with a cap of $2,000 per fiscal year.
The scholarship covers licenses, professional certifications, national testing fees, and associate degrees in portable career fields. Eligible participants must be spouses of active-duty or activated National Guard and Reservists.
Spouses use the portal to search for accredited schools, track academic progress plans, and send payment vouchers to learning centers.
Employment Pipelines and Fellowships
Finding military-friendly employers requires searching public job boards. SpouseWorks eliminates this guesswork via the Military Spouse Employer Partnership (MSEP). This corporate network contains more than 1,000 vetted corporate employers, federal agencies, and non-profit organizations.
Every corporate partner signs a commitment to recruit, hire, promote, and retain military spouses. The portal hosts a search engine containing over 420,000 live vacancies filtered for geographic flexibility and remote work options.
For spouses seeking corporate experience, the SpouseWorks Fellowship includes a hands-on pathway. This program places applicants into 12-week, full-time paid fellowships with participating host corporations. Fellowships target professional administrative, technical, and managerial tracks, pairing each candidate with a coach to maximize the chances of securing a permanent job through the temporary assignment.
Employment Toolkits
Via Spouseworks, the Department of Defense provides premium corporate tool subscriptions at no cost. Registered portal users can activate a free one-year subscription to FlexJobs, an online job board specializing in vetted remote, freelance, and flexible schedule careers.
Spouses can also claim a free one-year LinkedIn Premium upgrade to send messages to corporate hiring managers via InMail, and watch instructional videos in the LinkedIn Learning catalog to bridge skill gaps during relocations.
Who is Eligible?
Verified spouses of:
- Active-duty service members.
- Activated National Guard and Reserve component members serving under Title 10 orders.
- Surviving spouses of service members who died while on active duty.
- Spouses of service members separated from active duty, provided the registration occurs within 365 days of the separation date.
How to Start the Program
For a newcomer, the path begins by establishing an account on the central SpouseWorks portal and establishing your identity as a military spouse. Once you are in the system and verified, request an intake appointment with a career coach by calling 800-342-9647. This conversation maps out whether the spouse needs job placement through the MSEP engine, academic funding via the scholarship track, or placement via corporate fellowship applications.
About the author
Editor-in-Chief Joe Wallace is a 13-year veteran of the United States Air Force and a former reporter/editor for Air Force Television News and the Pentagon Channel. His freelance work includes contract work for Motorola, VALoans.com, and Credit Karma. He is co-founder of Dim Art House in Springfield, Illinois, and spends his non-writing time as an abstract painter, independent publisher, and occasional filmmaker.
