Apply off of fedjobs and go in off the street. You need 3 years of “progressively responsible work experience” (whatever that means) or 3 years of college or a combo of the two. You take a test called the AT-SAT and if you pass you apply for openings, then get interviewed as you would at any other job. Of those that pass the AT-SAT about 50% of OTS hires make the final cut at the academy any more and 50% of those washout of OJT. Since you get one shot only, going in without knowing jack about IFR ops can be a real career death sentence from what I’m hearing. Off the street hires also tend to get tossed to the hardest to staff facilities which means don’t expect the pick of the litter. Expect to get tossed in the places the other two types of hires don’t normally want.

You can go the military route. Pretty straight forward. Get the ASVAB score you need for the service you want, enlist as ATC and when your service is up, apply to the FAA. Learning to do something you’ve been doing for 4 odd years isn’t hard.

The civilian route is CTI… www.atccti.com 14 colleges and universities train controllers in 2 and 4 year degree programs. Same as the military route, if you’ve been doing the stuff for a few years it isn’t hard to learn how to do it all over again. Many CTI programs do their best to mimic the academy anyway, so you’ve already been there and done that.

Military and CTI hires have something like a 98% success rate.

Best of luck.

You must be able to control air traffic