After Soldiering, A Challenging Transition Into Civilian Work

Note that I use the word “transition” and not “translate.” The latter is often used when describing veterans’ employment struggles, as if a veteran’s problem is merely in their ability to explain on a resume their military job in civilian terms. This may be the case for a military communications specialist looking to work at AT&T. But for a soldier looking to transition into a career that has no direct overlap with his military job, the jump is much more difficult.

Kevin Schmiegel, Executive Director of the Hiring Our Heroes program and former Marine Lieutenant-Colonel, offered up the case of military truck drivers as an example of this phenomenon. One of the most common specialties in the military, states have recently been easing regulations to allow military truck drivers to transfer their certifications directly to the civilian realm. But as Schmiegel says, “What does this do for the soldiers who don’t want to drive trucks when they get out?”

Schmiegel refers to this as “re-branding,” teaching soldiers how to spin their military experience in a way that is more attractive to their chosen civilian profession. And the Hiring Our Heroes organization is taking steps to educate veterans in the re-branding process. Yet the veteran is only one side of a two-sided equation; the employer has to buy into the rebranding as well.

My own story offers another illustration of this point. After attending N.R.O.T.C. during college, I was commissioned into the Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer, a job that is very engineering focused in nature. Never being the engineering type, it wasn’t really the job I wanted in the Navy, but due to poor eyesight and how N.R.O.T.C. is structured, I didn’t have much of a choice. (The only other option was submarines—an engineering job on steroids.) After finishing my term of service, I went off to graduate school not knowing precisely what job I wanted to do but knowing it would involve media and international affairs in some way—the general career path I had envisioned for myself since my first months in undergrad.

As I began to talk to potential employers in the media and development consulting spaces, though, I was consistently confronted with the same question: Why would an engineer want to enter journalism or development? Not only was I an outlier in that I was a veteran; I was a veteran with skills totally unrelated to the fields I was looking to join. I found myself having to explain that neither engineering nor the military had ever been long-term ambitions of mine, that I had simply joined up to serve my country and pay for school. While many of my fellow junior officers waltzed into high-paying engineering jobs and junior management positions at huge corporations, I was often in a position of convincing people that I was not in fact changing careers, but just embarking on the career I had intended all along.

The all-volunteer military has created a mindset within the civilian job marketplace that the military is itself a career choice, no matter how short one’s term of service. As a result, veterans, upon exiting the military, are confronted with a circumscribed set of careers in which they can directly parlay the skills and experience they acquired during their service. They become “stovepiped”—set on a particular career track whether they like it or not. Infantrymen become security or law enforcement officers. Quartermasters become logisticians. Ship drivers become engineers. Gigantic military-like corporations, such as Walmart or Amazon or AT&T or big finance, gladly welcome veterans through their doors since they see them as already acclimated to rigid, hierarchical, rules-based organizations.

Friedman and Marvin touch on this important point. As Marvin says, “Military service does not replace industry experience or college education; rather, it enhances a resume, adding to existing credentials.” For veterans like myself who have extensive educations at quality schools, maneuvering around this stovepipe reality is generally not too high of a hurdle to overcome. But for the thirty-year-old artillery sergeant with a wife and two kids, going back to get his undergraduate degree is likely a much harder proposition. Instead he is forced to wade out into the job market equipped with a lot of vague words on his resume about leadership and timeliness and organization but without any industry experience or education to back them up. He is forced to cast around, looking for general “management” positions that don’t require college degrees or previous industry experience yet pay enough to support his family. In this economy, there are very few of those jobs left. He is forced, like Jaffe’s Guardsmen, to take whatever is left.

In the past, when the draft was in force, military service was viewed as a temporary thing, a short stint serving one’s country before a person could begin a real career. The draft also meant that the military was composed of a larger cross-section of society who entered all manner of industries. Today, the people most likely to hire veterans are other veterans, for the simple reason that they are most likely to value military experience and skills. This was made extraordinarily clear at the jobs fair, where most of the companies present, like Verizon and JP Morgan, employ huge percentages of veterans, and, not surprisingly, have some of the strongest veterans hiring initiatives around. Self-perpetuating feedback loops affecting whole sectors are the result, and the reason why some industries were heavily overrepresented at the fair while others were nearly nonexistent. Media companies, not known for employing many veterans, were horribly underrepresented at the fair, with only three corporations present (NBC Universal, Bloomberg, and CAA). Considering New York’s status as the nation’s media capital, the fact that there were ten times as many journalists covering the event as there were media companies represented speaks to an underlying structural disconnect.

When economic times are good and the country isn’t engaged in extended war, these problems, while still existent, are often invisible to the wider public. But the protracted hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the bad economy, have laid bare the flaws in the system. For veterans with technical skills looking to utilize those same skills in their civilian careers, the path to civilian employment may not turn out to be that difficult. But for soldiers like Carlos Ocampo, finding a civilian career outside of security and law enforcement can be a trial lasting years. If there is a veterans’ unemployment crisis, veterans like Ocampo are its face.

Marvin and Friedman are right when they say veterans aren’t asking for charity or sympathy. But the public needs to recognize that for a certain stratum of veterans—those looking to find work outside their military specialties, those with very military-specific skills, those whose familial obligations preclude further education or retraining—the road to a meaningful career is a hard one. Making that road easier, by promoting veteran education and rebranding and improving employer awareness, should be the focus veterans’ advocacy groups. This will not be an easy task. The much-publicized military-civilian gap is wide and getting wider. But we owe it to our veterans to try.