The beauty of the internet and social media is that it has given us a medium to connect millions of people instantly, where all our voices can be heard. We freely share our experiences and knowledge with each other and even though we’re strangers, we connect and learn from each other. The problem for the transitioning veteran is identifying what’s good or bad advise for leaving the service. Often times the worst offenders for giving out bad advice are the well-meaning veterans who are self-proclaimed experts that start dangerously doling out advice on things they know very little about.
We’ve noticed a trend, particularly on LinkedIn, where there are thousands of transition experts all giving advice on how to navigate the difficult process. Some give good advice having been out of the military for a while, learned the ropes of civilian life and offer their transitional experience for the betterment of their fellow veterans. Then there are those who more often that not miss the target of offering value-adding information. Let’s just put them in categories:
- The veterans who retired and immediately went to work for the government
- The veteran who got out of the military 6 days ago, but because he found a job, now he thinks he knows how to “successfully transition”
- The veteran who sees transition advice as a ticket to making a lot of money
- The veteran who wants to be a motivational speaker and tells you “everything is awesome!”
The Lack of Experience & Expertise
There is a well-known pillar of how wisdom is accumulated known as the DIKW pyramid. Wisdom is achieved by first collecting data, turning it into bits of information, then compiling it into knowledge. Enough knowledge produces wisdom. Reaching the wisdom phase is not something you can take a course on and POOF, you’re certified; you have to EARN it. Veterans who lack the time commitments necessary to develop experience and expertise in the civilian world, also lack the qualifications of claiming to be competent sources of knowledge and wisdom for other transitioning veterans. Basically, they don’t know enough to give you advice.
Transitioning out of the service isn’t easy; it is a never ending process and a constant review of your adjustment in the non-military world. Though it’s not easy, it doesn’t have to be hard. Lots of folks out there think that civilian hiring managers are dying to hire veterans. With all those organizations out there and transitions assistance resources available, it appears as if there are thousands and thousands of jobs JUST FOR YOU!
Yeah…that’s all bull.
It’s a great marketing technique for a company to say they’re going to hire a thousand veterans. What they’re actually doing is looking for veterans with a few years of civilian experience that served four years in the early 2000’s; not a newly minted veteran who just left the military this morning and is firmly wrapping themselves up in their DD-214 blanket.
Why?
Because the veteran getting out today doesn’t know anything about business. From a hiring managers perspective a veteran doesn’t understand my business, my customers, my product, how to make my product, how to sell my product, my organizational structure, etc.
To put it a different way. Imagine you had a CEO of some company who decide to join the military. They have no military experience; they’ve never even fired a gun. They were in charge of a multi-million dollar company though. Would you put that person in charge of a brigade of paratroopers in Afghanistan or, a Regiment of Marines or, a fleet of Navy ships? HELL NO! No way whatsoever! Why? This CEO obviously has great leadership; they were in charge of an entire commercial business company. Yeah, but he knows fuck-all about combat and he’s going to get people killed. Best I’d do is make him a low level Captain working for a seasoned staff officer in the command center so he can learn how we fight. This is exactly the type of job you’re going to get when you transition away from uniformed service and that’s a BEST case scenario.
Unfortunately there are assholes that don’t know any better (or realize it but don’t care) and are feeding inexperienced veterans bad information about how to step right into an executive or managerial leadership role. Or worse, the inexperienced “transition assistant” stepped into a company as an “executive” who’s sole purpose is to help other veterans find jobs. The funny but sad thing is Duffel Blog made a satire story about this very phenomenon. These transition assistants purport to know all the answers, have all the inside hiring scoops and, know the path veterans should take to transition successfully into corporate America.
Comforting Lies
Those people outlined above won’t tell you any of this. They don’t have the experience to know right from wrong. They haven’t actually been promoted in the civilian world. They don’t understand how civilian hiring managers make decisions because they’ve never been one or around one. They’ve never had to justify the additional headcount of another employee. They’ve never done an analysis on the cost of adding a person and the added revenue that person will bring in; whether it is sustainable for the long term because you don’t want to have to fire them 6 months from now. They simply don’t know.
Comforting lies are…well…comforting. Yelling “everything is awesome!” is disingenuous at best, dangerous at worst.
Besides that, getting a job is only the very FIRST step. Did you know that 44% of veterans leave their first job in the first year? Did you know that number jumps to 65% by year two? Why do you think that is? It happens partly because they haven’t been told what corporate life is like. No one told them to consider corporate cultures. No one told them to consider the product, the environment, their own personal desires, where they wanted to live, what is important to their family, what kind of work life balance they are looking for, why they got out and how this job works into that plan, I can go on – I wrote an entire book on the subject and regularly post here about it. Finding the right fitting job is more important that just finding any job.
Are you starting to see the picture yet?
Veterans are getting out, hate their jobs, get in financial trouble, which results in marriage trouble, which leads to substance abuse, and that to suicide. I’ve talked about this plenty with “break the chain“, and it’s the whole reason I started CONUS Battle Drills.
It does no one any good to talk about finding a job and calling that “transition”. The equivalent would be to give someone “marriage advice” but only talk about how to plan a wedding. Then some asshole gets up and starts talking about how you too can have a successful marriage the day he gets back from his honeymoon. The wedding (or job hunt) is the easiest part of the whole ordeal, but 90% of the “transition” advice I see out there focuses on this small element of transition. Don’t get me wrong, finding a job is critical, and there are plenty of organizations out there to help you do that, but it is NOT transition.
A Successful Transition…..?
This article is more about helping you, the veteran, identify potential pitfalls in your journey of moving into the civilian sector – your transition.
SO…how does a veteran judge themselves as having successfully transitioned? Is there a manual that has standard metrics, benchmarks or specific goals to achieve? One veteran’s perspective of success is wildly different from another. Some veterans want to get out and land a federal job while others want to be managers and executives in corporate America, still others want to work in civil service (police, fireman, teachers, etc.). Some just want to get out and hang out on camp couch under the 1st parents division for a while – however we highly advise that this not be your definition of success. Success is ultimately measured by the individual, not by other veterans or transition assistance “experts” metrics of success. There is no such thing a “successful” transition because success is measured differently from one person to the next.
Furthermore, a veteran never transitions out of the military, they learn how to meld their military and civilian lives together. NOBODY, not even the veteran themselves can ignore their military past. A transition by definition is process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another. A veteran isn’t changing from military to civilian; they blend and harmonize the two.
As noted earlier, it is a never ending process and a constant review of your adjustment in the non-military world. The question you should always be asking yourself is “How am I leveraging my experiences in the military to advance my post-military journey.” There is a process that business’ across the spectrum use to analyze themselves to plot their grow – it’s called the Deming Cycle.
- Plan: Forward moving steps to include points of reference to measure your success (i.e completing a class, earning a degree, getting hired, getting a promotion, etc.) – be it short term, long term, or some where in the middle
- Do: Implement the plan you developed
- Check: The progress of your plan to see if your meeting the measurement points – it’s alright if you fall short; the key is you made some goals to achieve.
- Act: On the review of the plan, identify what went well and what didn’t and, take the lessons learned back into the planning phase.
This cycle is a never ending, always repeating process of improvement. Some times the iteration is short and sometimes it is long. Either way the idea is to make goals and points of reference to measure yourself by so that you can adjust and steer your own personal ship (i.e your post-military journey).
I say again, Transition isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s over once you get a job.
Finally, for those of you struggling out there: you’re not alone. The majority of veterans have gone through this as well. You can do this.
-LJF & BY
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