Military Veterans and Employment: Four Hidden Issues and Potential Solutions

Making the leap from active-duty military service to successful civilian employment is hard. 

Photo By: Lance Cpl. Luke Hoogendam. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

I know. I did it in 2005. 

Despite my best efforts, I ended up in a dead-end outside sales job for which I was unprepared and in which my employer left me to sink or swim. 

After about two months, I sank. 

I got a better job, one that better fit my skills and abilities. But I was still underemployed. Thus began years of clawing with my fingernails for something better, pushing my way through graduate school and into what has become a fabulous career. 

Things worked out. But it was unexpectedly hard—for five reasons. One of those reasons is commonly discussed. Four of those reasons are hidden, or at least in my experience, they’re less frequently discussed. 

The one reason that’s common and well-discussed among veteran-assistance organizations is that it’s very difficult to translate what you did in the military into terms and roles that make sense to civilian human resources people and hiring managers. Because this is a very common and well-discussed issue, I won’t delve into it more deeply here. I will say that this is one area that military transition executive recruiters can be very helpful. Although I didn’t end up being placed through one of these service providers (due to me having issue number 2 below), I will put in an unsolicited plug for people like Lee Cohen at Lucas Group. He and others like him open doors to employers for veterans that would be hard for veterans to open without assistance.  

Let’s focus, therefore, on what I’m calling four “hidden” issues regarding military veterans and employment, and then I’ll offer a few ideas regarding potential solutions.

Here they are:

1. Unrealistic transition preview.

2. Geographic inflexibility.

3. A sense of entitlement.

4. A knowledge and skills gap.

Let’s unpack these with a bit more detail. 

Unrealistic Transition Preview

The problem: First, like any new experience, you can’t know exactly what it’ll be like until you do it. The same is true for transitioning from active-duty military service to civilian employment. Yet I had—and I sense that others may also have—an unrealistically positive view of what this transition would entail. I distinctly remember people telling me that after a few years as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy, employers would be falling over themselves to hire me. This simply isn’t the case, and it’s what I’m calling an “unrealistic transition preview.” Decades of research has taught us the value of having a realistic job preview, or of knowing what a job will entail prior to employment—warts and all. The same, I think, is true of the military-to-civilian employment leap. 

It’s simply better to know in advance—at least a little bit—what you’re getting into.

Potential solutions: To deal with unrealistic transition preview, military personnel should start planning for their post-military careers on day one of their military service. Even if a person stays on active duty for 20 or 30 years, he or she will make the transition to civilian life at some point. More specifically, military personnel on active duty should consider:

• Staying connected to civilian life. Military personnel should continue, as much as possible, to nurture interests and networks outside of the military. This must be intentional, because otherwise the military can easily become an all-encompassing lifestyle, and if you’re not careful, all of your friends will be military friends, all of your social relationships will become exclusively military-centric, and you’ll become increasingly isolated from the reality of the modern world of civilian work.

• Developing mentoring relationships with civilians. As part of staying connected to civilian life, military personnel should consider building and maintaining relationships with civilians who have successful careers. This will help military personnel stay abreast of what their careers might look like when they decide to leave active military service. Veterati appears to be a potentially helpful vehicle for such relationships.

• Managing their own expectations. Simply embracing the notion that transitioning to civilian employment will be hard could be helpful. It’s better to have expectations of difficulty and be pleasantly surprised than the other way around.

Geographic Inflexibility

The problem: When you’re trying to find a job, it’s a basic fact that you’ll have more options if you can go anywhere. Furthermore, the way most executive recruiters or “headhunters” operate is one that’s best suited for people who are willing to go where the job is located, versus having geographic restrictions (e.g., “I will only take a job in Charlotte, N.C.”). I get it—life is complicated. I used Charlotte as an example because that’s where my search focused due to my wife’s employment there.  

Potential solutions: I see two possible ways to deal with this issue. Military personnel planning their transition should consider:

• Being open to employment anywhere. I know, this is much easier said than done—and it’s an overly simplistic solution to this problem. It will, however, help one’s chances of getting a great job.

• Strategically focused networking. If you do have distinct geographic preferences for where you want to work and live after military service, one potentially helpful avenue is to focus your networking efforts on those groups and people located in the area in which you want to locate. Here’s the catch: These efforts often take months or years to yield benefits, so you should start well in advance of your desired transition date.

A Sense of Entitlement

The problem: We’re lucky to live in an era in which American sentiments about the military and military service are overwhelmingly positive. I really, really like that. It has made me feel appreciated for my active-duty service and subsequent reserve service (I’ve been in the U.S. Navy Reserve now for about 12 years, making for about 15.5 years of total service thus far). A complicated side effect, however, is that such consistent admiration combined with occasionally interesting and high-stakes work can result in a sense of entitlement. Namely, I’ve noticed a tendency among veterans (including myself, in 2005) to feel like we deserve civilian employment. But such thinking is not only incorrect—no one owes me a job unless I provide value to them or their organization—but it’s also unattractive. Such an attitude could negatively affect how you act and talk about yourself, leading to a tougher-than-necessary transition to civilian life. Note that I’m not saying that all military personnel or veterans have this sense of entitlement, but it is something I’ve noticed, and it’s a potential barrier to successfully transitioning to civilian employment. 

A potential solution: Military personnel transitioning to civilian employment should remember to stay humble and to stay hungry. We have some wonderful, transferrable skills—like leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, and more—but we also have much to learn. Civilian organizations run differently than military organizations, so it’s up to us to crack the code of what they do, how and why they do it, and how we can add value.  

A Knowledge and Skills Gap

The problem: As discussed above, part of the problem with military transition is that it’s hard to translate military jobs and skills into language that resonates with civilian hiring managers. That’s true. But it’s also true that businesses need people with knowledge and skills that aren’t taught in the military. Despite our transferrable skills, we veterans aren’t always God’s gift to Corporate America. For example, military service doesn’t teach you fundamentals of accounting, finance, marketing, or entrepreneurship. One could argue that military service does provide some background in management, yet there’s still a great deal to be learned about how civilian organizations run (e.g., civilian human resources law, hiring practices, talent management, and more). 

Potential solutions: If one accepts the premise that military personnel might have a knowledge and skills gap regarding what civilian organizations need, potential solutions center upon education and training. A proactive approach toward gaining such knowledge and skills could include the following:

• Seeking transformative educational experiences. Boot camp, Officer Candidate School, Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, and the military service academies are effective for training and socializing people for military service because they are intense, transformative experiences. To gain additional skills and knowledge of value in the civilian world, similarly transformative educational experience can help. For example, IESE Business School is actively recruiting military veterans for its Global Executive MBA, a top-ranked global program. My good friend (and fellow Navy officer) Matt Larkin went through this program, and he raves about it. I encourage anyone in the military—active or veteran—who wants a transformative, global experience to check it out. Click here for more information. IESE, by the way, is also the top executive education provider in the world as rated by the Financial Times for the past three years, and they’re actively seeking military veterans for those programs as well. I encourage military folks to learn more about two of their programs—Driving Leadership Potential and the Advanced Management Program and consider attending a preview day on Friday, Jan. 12 in New York City.

• Seeking employers that have a history of dealing well with veterans. One could potentially gain the necessary knowledge and skills for successful civilian employment through on-the-job training as well. And such training, or at least an ability to support newly hired veterans, is more likely to exist in organizations that deal well with veterans. One organization that helps to identify such organizations is Victory Media, which happens to have former Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Mike Stevens as its chief operating officer.

• Gaining professional certifications that civilian organizations value. An additional path toward gaining knowledge and skills that will help with successful transition to civilian employment for veterans is through obtaining professional certifications that employers recognize and value. Some examples come from the areas of project management, human resources (two organizations that offer certifications are SHRM and HRCI), investment management, and supply chain management. Numerous others abound.

Finally, myriad organizations exist to help veterans. Here’s the page where you can download a list of them from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Here’s another list from Military.com. Not too long ago, Facebook launched its own group for veterans, with a focus on the technology industry. And I’m sure many others are out there doing great work (feel free to highlight any in the comments below). 

Above all, I think there’s value in broadening the conversation about what it takes to transition successfully from military service to civilian employment. And perhaps thinking about some of these “hidden” issues could be a place to start. 

I welcome and look forward to your comments and thoughts. 

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. He regularly consults leaders and organizations across a wide range of sectors and industries. Visit: www.benbaran.com.

Take the High Road in Office Politics

If you haven’t worked in the military or alongside the military as part of a larger operation, you may think that the danger of being in a warzone or the importance of the overall mission may supersede the political games people often play in organizations.

I wish that were true. 

I was part of NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A) from December 2012 to December 2013. I quickly learned upon my arrival was that NTM-A comprised myriad types of people from myriad groups around the world. In general, however, there were three groups: the military and members of national police forces (from many countries), U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) civilians, and civilian contractors. Many of the DoD civilians were part of a group known as Ministry of Defense Advisors, or MoDAs. 

The MoDAs were participants in a special program that trained experienced government civil servants and retired military personnel to be advisors to the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
Doug (not his real name) was a MoDA. He was a GS-15, which refers to the U.S. government pay grades for civilians. It also means that he was roughly the civilian equivalent of a U.S. Army colonel or U.S. Navy captain. That’s important because it means he outranked me at the time by two levels. Doug was also former military, so he knew about rank structure, and he frequently used it to his advantage. 

Being a relatively friendly (I think) person who advised Afghans in similar areas as Doug, I would sometimes discuss matters with Doug and work with him on various issues. One of my main areas that I was working upon was literacy, because about 70 percent of the Afghan National Police either couldn’t read at all or couldn’t read at a level high enough for them to do their job. That makes it kind of hard to enforce laws and be a good police officer. 

The Afghan police colonel whom I advised—a friendly, animated, jet-black-bearded man in his 40s or early 50s of Pashtun ethnicity—needed his boss at the Afghan Ministry of Interior to authorize him to do anything related to literacy training for the police. This highlights one of the many frustrating aspects about working within the Afghan governmental structures: Everything was highly centralized. That means that decision-making happened at a much higher level than is typical in most U.S. organizations. 

Instead of a colonel just “getting things done,” he’d need to get his boss to approve, and often he’d need his boss’ boss to approve. One wrong misstep would cost the colonel his job, and maybe more. This fact made progress slow and significantly concentrated power at higher levels within the Afghan bureaucracy. 

Doug’s job was to mentor my Afghan colonel’s boss, who was an overweight, clean-shaven lieutenant general of Hazara background who had a habit of avoiding direct eye contact and often looked rather sleepy.  Because Doug mentored him, I could sometimes get my Afghan colonel to do things by asking Doug to tell his Afghan lieutenant general to tell my guy to take action. So Doug and I had a limited-yet-amicable history of working together. 

The problem was that Doug had the habit of often trying to get people who didn’t directly work for him (like me) to do work that he should be doing himself. One week in late July 2013, Doug mentioned to me that his Afghan lieutenant general would be convening a “literacy working group” on the following Saturday to address literacy training issues within the police. I replied that it sounded like a good idea, and that he should tell his lieutenant general to be sure to invite my Afghan colonel. Although he didn’t directly say it, Doug implied that I should be at the meeting as well. 

The problem with me attending that meeting, however, was three-fold. First, the meeting was at the Ministry of Interior, a location to which my unit didn’t typically travel. So going there would present a logistical issue in terms of transportation. Second, if I attended the meeting, I would be implicitly reinforcing the notion that NTM-A would do most of the work—work that needed to transition to the Afghans. Third, and most importantly, being present at the meeting would perpetuate the notion—both on the Afghan and NTM-A sides—that literacy training for the police was an issue to be relegated to one single, relatively powerless Afghan colonel. Instead, the lieutenant general at the Ministry of Interior, Doug’s guy, needed to own the program for it to be successful. 

As such, Saturday came and went. I didn’t attend the meeting. I fully expected that Doug would be annoyed that I didn’t do what he wanted, but for the good of the program overall, I was fine with that. I also fully expected Doug to confront me on my lack of attendance the following day. I discussed this on Sunday morning with my Dutch officemate, a friendly major with an equal appreciation for cigarettes and coffee. Sure enough, within the next 30 minutes, my phone rang. I could tell by the phone number that appeared on my phone that it was Doug. 

I looked over at my Dutch colleague and said, “Watch this.”

“Good morning, Doug! How are you doing, my friend?” I said with over-caffeinated exuberance. 

Silence. 

An awkward pause. 

“Lieutenant Commander Baran, we missed you at the meeting yesterday.” I could tell that my friendliness had taken him off guard. “Oh, wow, Doug, I didn’t know I was invited.” 

Another awkward pause. “Well, your guy was there, and it was all about literacy, which is your thing.” 

“So, Doug, is this literacy working group going to meet again?,” I said. “Because if so, it really needs to be driven by your guy’s office.” 

“Yeah, I’ll let you know. I think they have another meeting planned soon.” 

“Sounds great, Doug. Keep me in the loop for sure. Have a great day.” 

“You too, commander.” 

Click. 

The conversation took less than 45 seconds. If I had gone with my default attitude—my initial evaluation of the situation—I would have most likely been annoyed and somewhat confrontational. That would have come through in both what I said and how I said it. The conversation would have likely turned out poorly, and my working relationship with Doug would have suffered. 

More importantly, our mission with the Afghans would have suffered as a result. 

But because I deliberately chose to shift my attitude toward something positive, it caught Doug off guard. Much like a jiu jitsu fighter uses his opponent’s momentum to win the match, taking the high road with a positive attitude can quickly shift how people react to us. 

Doug and I continued to have a productive working relationship after this small incident. I’m confident that it had much to do with the attitude that I chose to own as it pertained to him and our work together. 

Don’t get me wrong—it’s hard to choose your attitude in situations like this. I’ve failed in this exercise far more times than I’ve succeeded. 

But being the “bigger person” frequently involves swallowing your pride and truly considering the long-term implications of how you interact with and treat those around you.       

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com.

Ben is also the author of the e-book, The Navy’s 11: Reflections and tips for leaders everywhere based upon the U.S. Navy’s Leadership Principles. It’s full of ...

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Never Give Up, Never Stop Learning

Photo By: Lance Cpl. Jesus Sepulveda Torre. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

Although I teach courses on various topics related to leadership, I’m quick to admit it: Learning a lot about leadership won’t necessarily make you a great leader. 

Similarly, just because someone has 20 years of experience doing something doesn’t necessarily make him or her an expert. It’s quite possible—and common—for people to have the same experience, 20 years in a row. 

What oftentimes elevates truly great leaders above the rest is their tenacity, their commitment to never give up—and to never stop learning. It’s their ability to persevere through adversity with an open mind, applying the lessons they acquire along the way. 

One such leader whom I’ve always enjoyed listening to and reading about is United States Marine Corps General James Mattis (ret.). Among recent military leaders, Mattis is a legend, particularly if you talk with other U.S. Marines. 

Stories about his selfless, direct style of leadership abound. 

Additionally, his use of the “knife hand”—basically pointing for emphasis with all of one’s fingers outstretched and the hand oriented such that the little finger is closest to the ground, like the sharp edge of a knife—is equally legendary.  

So I couldn’t help but pause for a moment recently when the Marines released a video of Mattis talking about leadership. In the video, he answers a number of questions related to leadership. At the end, he even addresses the lethality of his knife hand. 

He’s quick to point out that it was the spirit of the people he led, his Marines, that kept him motivated throughout his career. 

And in no uncertain terms, he says that the key to improving continually as a leader is that “You have to assume that you must keep improving.” For Mattis, this is simply a given. Leaders must “maintain this body, mind and spirit improvement at all times.”

But above all, I’m impressed with his humble-yet-confident demeanor. People tend to follow those who know where they’re headed, but at the same time they’re inspired by those who are humble enough to share recognition with the team for getting stuff done. 

Or, as Mattis says, “You’re not going to win any fights as a leader. Your troops are going to win those fights.”

Take a few minutes to listen to these and other bits of timeless leadership wisdom in the video below. 

Although none of us will go through the same situations as Mattis and it’s unlikely that any of us will achieve his level of regard among any group of leaders, not to mention leaders in the U.S. Marine Corps, there’s plenty that we can learn from his style. 

And if we do, I think we’ll be just a little better equipped than we were before to adapt to change and to perform well in adversity.

That’s not to say that it’s easy. Quite to the contrary, leadership is hard. It’s often vastly different from the somewhat romantic vision that we sometimes have of it. But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that leadership can’t be effective. 

Because, as Mattis says, “Difficulty is an excuse that the Marine Corps will never accept.” 

What excuses do you accept? What do you tolerate, in yourself, in those around you, in your organization?

And what, during the next week or so, can we all do to re-identify what’s important, to re-commit to never giving up and never stopping our process of learning?

Find this thought provoking? Leave a comment, like and share!

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com.