When Lieutenant Commander Bill Reynolds retired from the Navy in 2012 after 30 years of active service, he didn’t know what the term “business casual” meant, much less how to apply for the jobs that required it.
“I had to Google it,” Reynolds says. “I got so used to wearing the uniform.”
When Reynolds first joined the military in 1982, he enlisted as a hospital corpsman, and went on to serve as the only medical provider on submarines. After completing a Navy-sponsored Physician Assistant program, he’d spend the last 15 years of his military career serving as a PA through deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of his tenure, he had experienced more than a civilian PA could ever imagine. Still, he found himself unprepared for the challenges
“There's a program in the Navy called the Transition Assistance Program, but it's only a week long,” says Reynolds, who today works as the director of the Military and First Responder Trauma Recovery Program at Sierra Tucson, an addiction treatment center. “In a perfect world there would be a month’s time set aside where you get help with filing VA benefits and [finding] resources that are available. One week isn't enough.”
Read more:
In 2020, the jobless rate for all veterans increased to 6.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Of the 581,000 unemployed veterans last year, 54% were ages 25 to 54, 41% were ages 55 or above and 5% were ages 18 to 24. Of course, these numbers also reflect the effects of the pandemic, but prove that despite having a long working history within the military,
“The military is extremely linear in its approach — there's a standard operating procedure and your job description is defined,” says Jeff McMillan, an Army veteran and chief analytics and data officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. “And then all of a sudden you take your uniform off and it's all gone. There's nothing. And it's scary because you don't even know what you should be asking to do.”
It’s not that veterans don’t have the skills for civilian jobs, according to McMillan, who mentors veterans and co-chairs Morgan Stanley's Veterans program. It's that they lack the support necessary to learn how to translate those skills into terms civilian employers would understand.
“The military trains you to be a soldier and they do extraordinarily,” he says. “They teach us how to fight and how to participate in combat. And while many of those underlying skills are incredibly valuable and applicable to the civilian world, nobody told me how to find a job. Nobody told me how to network. Nobody told me how to navigate and market myself for a position in the civilian sector. Nobody. I had to figure it out myself.”
Within the military, educational opportunities to earn a BA, an MA and even a MBA while serving exist, should members have the initiative to take advantage of them, and government-sponsored transition assistance programs, like the one Reynolds experienced, exist within all branches. In addition, 90-day skills bridge program conducted by the Department of Defense pays veterans to fulfill a civilian role on an internship-like basis.
Read more:
But even with the existence of those seemingly robust programs, many veterans feel under-prepared once they hit the job market. Because at the end of the day, no one can prepare a civilian employee for civilian work like a civilian employer. That’s where
“[The workforce] is a different environment than the military, so how do we give the tools and support instead of just assuming that they can navigate through?” Sturrus says. “They'll ask questions when they have them, but how do we go above and beyond to make sure that they're taking advantage of the programs that are in place and we're supporting them and directing them there?”
There is no shortage of companies that are putting forward efforts to try and attract veterans. UPS, American Express, Wells Fargo and Bank of America have their own established outreach programs, to name a few. But after years of working in hyper-specific fields, many veterans don’t even know what they want to do with the remainder of their careers, which is why it’s critical to pair recruiting tactics with a variety of available job options.
In 2021, Alight launched a recruitment portal tailored specifically to veterans, equipped with a skills translator tool that allows veterans to manually input their military experience and positions, and the system breaks them down and returns viable open positions within Alight’s network that may correspond with those experiences. For example, a veteran that worked as military police will likely be paired with positions in fraud detection and protection, Sturrus says, the law enforcement of the financial world.
“They don't have to try to interpret and read between lines,” Sturrus says.
Hiring more veterans isn't just to the veterans’ advantage, but
Read more:
“I have never worked with a group of individuals who are loyal not just to the organization, but to the organization's purpose,” he says. “Core values become ingrained in them in ways that I've not seen with other colleagues who we've been onboarded. It’s more than commitment to the organization, it’s commitment to getting it done right.”
Finding pathways for veterans in need and lowering the unemployment rate for this demographic has to be a joint effort between the private and military sector, because the systems currently in place are leaving veterans feeling like they’re “shooting from half court,” according to McMillan.
Fortunately, unemployment is not the toughest battle most veterans have had to face, and many of them are prepared to fight for their jobs as long as employers are there to provide them the means to get them.
“Your job is to take the hill,” McMillan says. “And if to take that hill, you have to have to have 50 conversations, then you have those 50 conversations and when you come back you'll have a much better sense of who you are and your story and your narrative.”
