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These Three Skill Sets Create a Veterans’ Advantage
HigherEdMilitary
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All veterans possess three skills sets that advantage them in comparison to many other job seekers, and veterans themselves should articulate them when speaking with potential employers. Smart hiring managers should seek out and embrace these skills as well. Because most professional positions are highly competitive, candidates with additional competencies often distinguish themselves as being better prepared for plum opportunities. Due to their training and experience, almost always, veterans are among the most competitive applicants in many different ways.
Meta-Skills
Proponents of higher education often tout the value of education as the underlying skills acquired from a broad liberal education, not just the knowledge gained. Critical thinking, information literacy, problem-solving, and communication are often lauded as virtues of post-secondary education. These meta-skills are said to have life-long value and enable recipients to be successful in their first jobs and every successive position throughout their careers. What is often missed is that veterans have a similar and sometimes larger portfolio of both practical and intangible skills that prepare them for long term success inside and outside of the workplace. However, these facts are not always acknowledged.
Like traditional students in colleges and universities, veterans learn the indoctrination of information literacy (taught from discerning military intelligence), problem solving in hazardous circumstances, and the critical thinking needed to make immediate tactical and often battlefield decisions. Situational awareness is a skill that is honed for safety reasons, but it also applies to appreciating the context and circumstances of any work environment. Environmental scanning for business is an example of this concept. In a chaotic combat environment, in complex operational circumstances, and working on a world-wide basis, communication is essential. Communication fundamentals are interwoven into all military training.
Professional Skills
In additional to meta-skills, veterans possess proven and unquestioned professional skills that are inculcated in them and that should be the envy of any non-veteran. Veterans learn tenacity, grit, laser focus, follow-through, pride, teamwork, collaboration, camaraderie, and shared values. What organization-private sector, non-profit, government, military-can exist without a large helping of these qualities found within their ranks? Veterans come prepackaged with a built-in set of professional skills and mindsets. The military work ethic is a bedrock principle and the stuff of legends. Another advantage is the multiculturalism that the rest of America should emulate. The military has time and again shown what it looks like to celebrate our differences and integrate them into a single mission-focused team that is bound for success.
Occupational Skills
Third, there are far too many misconceptions, stereotypes, and broad assumptions about what military service is and does. Nearly every profession that exists in the 'civilian' world exists within the military ecosystem. Veterans, therefore, receive the same occupational experiences as their counterparts. In military service there are personnel administrators (HR professionals), signal corps staff (information technology), doctors, dentists, nurses, engineers, attorneys, pilots and aviation personnel, finance professionals, security (military police and some infantry assignments), procurement managers, logisticians, (military science) professors, and many more. In many cases their work is performed under more austere or demanding environments than their counterparts. Therefore, the occupational skill sets that veterans acquire should be recognized. It is also a little-known fact that a large percentage of the trainers who teach and educate servicemen and women are civilian personnel.
Work Environments
In speaking with a retired general recently, he reminded me that two-thirds of his staff over the last three positions he held were civilians. He and many other of the 1.3 million of those on active duty work alongside nearly 800,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense. And in many work environments, civilians outnumber active military personnel sometimes 2, 3, 5 or 10 to 1. These do not include military contractors who work for various companies and corporations that support our men and women in uniform. The images of green camouflage-clad soldiers who are rigid in their thinking and actions and do not and cannot relate to the 'real world' are mostly ill-informed and misguided Hollywood stereotypes. The challenge is that these misconceptions often create barriers to employment for returning veterans and keep them from opportunities befitting of their knowledge, skills, abilities, and other professional experiences.
Veterans can be the best prepared employees because they come with the requisite occupational preparation, and a host of additional meta-skills and professional skills and experiences that give them an edge when performing in any demanding work environment. While their language and lingo may be different, they have a rich portfolio of valuable skills that are not often found in the same measure elsewhere. Veterans often have employment advantages that are not fully acknowledged and are often underappreciated and underutilized. Therefore, veterans must do their part and share a fuller picture of their background with would-be employers in their cover letters and resume to increase their job search success.
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