Tag: ETS

Our Next Mission

Are you tired and frustrated with the current job market?  I think it falls to us now, the “Warrior Class,” to once again answer the call of our nation.  It is up to us to change the landscape of our country’s economy.  That’s where CONUS Battle Drills and companies like Lucas Group come into play.  We cannot change it from the outside, but we can enter into Corporate America and into positions of authority in order to hire more of our veteran brothers and sisters.  If we outperform our counterparts and move into positions which allow us to influence and develop the hiring practices of the company then that is where we can make real change.  We will not only be helping the veteran community but the American economy as well.  It seems all too often once we transition, we forget all about the others going through the struggle to land a great career opportunity.  We don’t want to lose that sense of teamwork and camaraderie, the sense of taking care of your buddy.  Your performance everyday at your job sets the conditions for the next group of transitioning veterans.  You don’t have to be the CEO to make this change.  Be the employee who your bosses use as the model for all future hires.  They are going to look at your background and realize that what sets you apart from others is most likely your military service.  Regardless, you can’t be that employee until you get your foot in the door.  Be humble, be gracious, and be better than anyone you’re up against.  Prepare effectively for your transition.  Save money, network as much as possible, and chase opportunities over location or titles.  Become an expert at interviewing.  It’s like PT: you can’t skip PT everyday and expect to score a 300 on the APFT.  The only thing you can control in this process is your own attitude.  Here are a few lessons learned from helping veterans for the last 10 years to help set your expectations.

#1 – You need to go where the opportunities are.

A FORTUNE 500 Company doesn’t concern itself about your preference on location.  They are looking for the right person who is willing to go where they are needed (sound familiar?).  Go where you can help the company/team the most.  You don’t need to be open to relocating anywhere in the world, but be as open as you possibly can. I promise it will be better than Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Sill, etc…

 

#2 – You’re not worth $100K right now.

It doesn’t matter what Unit you were in or how many badges and ribbons you earned.  You are entering into this new corporate career with nothing but potential and raw talent. This is important, but it’s not everything.  If a Private enlists at 32 years old with a college degree and work experience, the Army is not going to make them a Company Commander.  The same rules apply in the corporate sector. Most job opportunities are not going to pay $100K to start, because you don’t have the industry experience or the institutional knowledge yet.  However, you will learn very quickly and, as you get better, you will be compensated for it.  I advise candidates I’m working with to have a long term goal of becoming the person you were in your last unit after 3-4 years.  You were the person who people knew could get the job done, had a network of people who could rally in any circumstance, and you were someone who could be counted on to do the job right and on time.  That’s the person everyone wants to hire, and you know you already are that person.

#3 – Get your foot in the door.

If you are lucky enough to land a career with a FORTUNE 100 or 500 Company seize these opportunities. My first boss, mentor, and fellow Infantryman here at Lucas Group, Andrew Hollitt, would say “you should be willing to clean the toilets at a company like this”. I always found that funny, but the longer I do this the more I think it’s true.  Most of folks have no idea how many positions a big company fills every year internally.  The opportunities you see on the job boards or LinkedIn are the ones they’re struggling to fill.  Once you are hired, you’ll see how many places and directions you can go.  I’ve placed job candidates just like you as productions supervisors and a year later they’re in Human Resources, Information Technology, Research & Development, etc.…  That never happens if you don’t get your foot in the door.  As Wayne Gretzky once said, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

This section is for those of you who have already transitioned.  I’ve been placing veterans for the past 10 years at Lucas Group, yet it always surprises me how little we hear from folks again when it’s their turn to hire.  The entire veteran community needs your help!  If you’re already out there in the workforce, hire a Veteran and, more importantly, set the conditions for his/her success.  Your example sets the tone for future hires.  It is so disheartening when we place a candidate and after 3 months on the job they make a poor decision, such as failing a drug test.  Do you think that company is ever going to be excited to hire another veteran with that as a previous experience?  That person has made it harder for future veterans to get a job there.  We can never hire enough of our brothers and sisters.  It’s like Army Transportation, “There’s always room for one more!”

Spend money where veterans are employed and with companies who support Veteran causes.  That’s our power as consumers.  I love companies such as Ranger Up, ART 15 Clothing, Grunt Style, The Chive, and I spend my money there.  I can buy t-shirts and hoodies anywhere, but I’d rather spend my money knowing it’s going to companies that are veteran owned and operated and/or support our community.  That is one of the most effective ways we can create real change.

We can find plenty to complain about with the current job market, our current jobs, etc., or we can roll up our sleeves and get to work.  It’s really one of the only choices we have.  It requires real hard work and, as veterans, we know that none of us are allergic to hard work!  We have the ability to change lives and to make Veterans feel needed and wanted.  Maybe it will help some of our brothers and sisters feel valued and needed enough to help prevent the rampant suicides we see amongst our veteran family. Maybe it will provide a fellow veteran with the means to take amazing care of his/her family and help him/her to be a better parent or spouse.  We are capable of this and so much more.  Let’s get to work!

-EC

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When should you start preparing to ETS?

It’s really frustrating as someone who is trying to help guys have a smooth transition when I get a message from a guy who is one or two months from ETS and asks me to look at his resume.  There’s really no time anymore, and you are way behind schedule, but I really can’t blame you because no one has told you otherwise…until now!

12 Months, 9 Months, 6 Months, 3 Months

Alright, so I’m going to try and break this one down barney style so you can remember easy and share with your buddies that aren’t as far ahead of the power curve as you and aren’t reading this blog.

12 Months out

Answer the 4 Big questions:

  1. Are you financially ready to get out?
  2. Do you know WHY you’re getting out?
  3. Do you know where you want to live?
  4. Do you know what you want to do?

You may click on any one of those for details, and if you haven’t read it before, please click on each one now.  Go on.  I’ll wait…

Alright, good, so now you know how to answer the 4 Big questions.  You have to take care of that 12 months out because everything you do next is going to be driven by those answers.  Particularly if you’re not ready in #1, you’re going to need at least a year to square yourself away (some of you might need more than that).

9 Months Out

At this point, I want you to contact your recruiter.  Yes, you need a recruiter.  No, you are not going to have more success finding a job on your own.  Look, there are a lot of shady folks out there and crappy companies.  I only recommend Lucas Group because that was who I decided to work with and they were awesome.  The bottom line is that these guys make a living out of finding you a job, they are the best at it.  They understand the job market better than anyone, they know how to translate your skills, and they have inside leads to what jobs are out there.

You need to make contact 9 months out because of the answer to big question # 3.  If you want to move back home and are severely restricted geographically, you’re going to need a long time for them to find you a job.  You’re also going to relieve a lot of stress and pressure on yourself if you don’t NEED to find a job in the next two days.

6 Months out

Take some leave.  Seriously, go on a vacation, enjoy some stress free time.  I know you want to save it up for terminal leave, but shit is about to get crazy, and you are not going to be on vacation after you get out, you’re going to be starting a whole new life.  So take a bit of that saved up cash and go spend some alone time with your significant other, visit the family, go on a cruise, whatever makes you relaxed, do that.

As soon as you get home, you need to start preparing for your interview.  Read more about that here.  Your recruiter will be calling you and inviting you to hiring conferences, and you want to be prepared.

3 Months out

Interview time!  Hopefully you’ve already had one or two interviews, but if not, this is when you really need to start devoting a significant amount of time to interview preparation and conducting interviews.  If you haven’t gotten any interviews and your location restrictions were too narrow, you should open them up to a region or a state at an absolute minimum.  This means you might need to revisit the four big questions with your wife.  If she was expecting to move back home near mom and dad, but you’re three months out and haven’t had one interview there, you need to open up that geography or you’re going to be in a financial shitstorm pretty quick.

1 Month out

At this point you better have a damn job offer in hand, know where you’re moving, and have a budget set up for your new job.  Transition needs to be your full time job.  Do not allow your command to pressure you to do your job, in a few weeks you’re not going to be around at all, and guess what?  The military is going to survive without you.

Alright, I know that things may be different in your exact scenario, and there are a lot of good reasons for that, but I want to highlight a couple things:

  1. You need to be planning at least 1 year out
  2. This is an absolutely critical time in your life and you need to take it seriously, keep the lines of communication open with your family, and prepare ahead of time so you can adapt to the challenges you will face

Good luck!
-LJF

 

Getting out of the military is hard!  Don’t make it harder on yourself by not being prepared!  Buy CONUS Battle Drills:  A Guide for Combat Veterans to Corporate Life, Parenthood, and Caging the Beast Inside!

The first few months

I know it’s been a while since I’ve had a post.  This is mostly a one man show, and sometimes life grabs you by the balls and you have to focus all your energy in gingerly extricating yourself out of that particular conundrum.  That’s another way of saying I’ve been busy, but I’ve been thinking about you guys still.  So lets get to it.

When you first get out…

You have just uprooted everything in your life.  Most of you joined the military in your teens or early 20’s.  All of your friends are from the military, your free time, your hobbies, your interests were all molded by the time you served, even your haircut and the clothes you wore were influenced by the military.  Now you’re on your own.

Maybe you moved some place new.  You probably started a new job, and now you’re trying to make new friends.  Your wife no longer has an FRG support group, and your kids are in a new school.  Everyone is experiencing higher levels of stress, and most of the time, you’re going to have troubles in your job as well.

You need to give yourself a chance to figure this life out, take a breath, and make sure everyone in your family group is on the same page.  It’s not all sunshine and rainbows like you thought it was going to be, but just like the beginning of your military career: the first week at basic training is not what the rest of your career will be like.

Training

Believe it or not, the military does an excellent job of training and preparing you for each new position compared to the civilian world.  Before every major leadership step, there is a training academy of some sort with a single standard that one must at least achieve before actually performing in that role.  From basic training to CGSC, every one of you went through some sort of training.  You were taught the basics that every soldier must know to survive, then you were taught the minimum requirement for the next leadership position you were going to take.  That training didn’t stop there though.  When you arrived at your unit, you were trained further, or maybe you went to MOS specific schooling, the bottom line is that you spent an assload of time just learning how to do your job.

When you get in the civilian world, you’re probably going to get a day or maybe two on safety information, some powerpoint on what your job is, and that’s pretty much it.  Yes, I understand there are exceptions, but most entry level jobs will require very little training and that is what you will get.  The end result is that when you start your job, you will have no fucking idea what you are doing for the first time in your life (or since you can remember) and that is going to be frustrating as hell.

I remember sitting in the office asking questions and trying to find things to do because I was so damn lost all the time.  One would think that as a former Infantry Lieutenant I would be comfortable being lost, but I hated it.  I hated not knowing and understanding the business.  It pissed me off that I didn’t know the intricacies of manufacturing, material flow, or what a Kanban was.  I certainly didn’t know how to use SAP or how to fill out employee time cards.  I felt like I was failing at a job that I knew I should have been able to do.

It gets better

Over time I learned about the business, and all my frustrations made me that much better at my job because I would not stop until I had answers.  Then once I understood what I was doing, I started working to make it better.  How can this process be improved?  What parallels can I draw from the military here?  Where are there efficiency gaps?

Once I was able to become a change agent because I understood the business, then the job became much more rewarding.  I was training other folks as they came in, anticipating problems before they occurred, and improving my sphere of influence.  This helped me get a great work/life balance, spend more time as a husband and father,  even find time to write a book and start the blog you’re reading which has brought me great joy (thanks for all the messages!).  Life is great, and I am so glad I made the decisions I did.

I’m better than you

I got an email from one of my old SSG’s who has a Bronze Star license plate.  Some dude asked him what the star meant and jokingly he answered, “It means I’m better than you.”  I loved this guy because of his unrelenting sarcasm regardless of the situation, but sometimes it’s missed.  “I laughed and smiled but he definitely didn’t think it was funny,” he told me in a message.

Now before all you keyboard warriors start typing away about how much a problem that attitude is with the military, let me tell you something:  No one gives a fuck what you think and you don’t have to tell the world when you don’t like something.  You can, in fact, shut the fuck up and move on.

So anyway…Many of us really do struggle with taking a step backwards responsibility wise.  You spent years making life or death decisions leading hundreds of men and accounting for millions of dollars of equipment, now you’re in charge of no one and the only property you have you can hold in one hand [queue the dick jokes].  It’s hard to stay motivated, particularly if you have a shitty boss too.  If you stick with it, if you can endure some bullshit while you learn about the business, I can tell you, you are going to move up fast.  The skills you learned in the military are going to make a huge difference, and you will see that the only limitation to your potential will your wants because few people out there can compete with you.

-LJF

 

Getting out of the military is hard!  Don’t make it harder on yourself by not being prepared!  Buy CONUS Battle Drills:  A Guide for Combat Veterans to Corporate Life, Parenthood, and Caging the Beast Inside!

The Dark Night of the Soul- Part 1

This is the first part of two-part postings on suicide. The first part deals with a general introduction to the problem and the concept of risk and protective factors. The second part will address more intrapersonal, individual factors and possible options to find hope and relief. However, it is important to keep in mind this is a very complex subject that resists any attempt to quick fixes or easy solutions. We humbly approach this deadly subject with hopes at understanding it better and hopefully finding possible solutions.

The man in front of me was looking distressed and his words were coming out with great difficulty. He was a platoon SGT, with multiple combat deployments, and currently having problems with chronic pain, poor sleep, and depression. As we discussed his background and his military experience, something seemed not right. As we progressed in our interview, I asked him if something had occurred recently. He looked up to me and said, “Yesterday I found out one of my guys from my platoon in Afghanistan committed suicide, he was like a son to me”

For those of us in the military, these are sadly, common occurrences. We all know somebody or know of somebody, who has taken his life. The news is devastating. These men have been in combat, shared great dangers and adversities, and through it all, they survived and came home only to end their lives at their own hands.  We feel sad, powerless, angry, and we ask ourselves why?

It may be surprising to some, but there was a time in the past that suicide in the military was much lower (20% and more in some cases) than in the civilian population; in fact, being in the military used to be a protective factor. However, all of that began to change around 2004, and suicide rates have continued to rise and maintain at levels much higher that our civilians counterparts. By 2012, when we were still significantly involved in combat operations, more soldiers died by suicide than those killed in action, a very sobering fact. It does not take a genius to see that the rise in suicide rates corresponded to the onset of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars our longest wars to date. Yet, the statistical link between deployments and suicide is at best weak or non-existent, a fact that adds complexity to this issue.

There are hundreds of studies and millions of dollars spent in trying to find a solution, or even an understanding to this perplexing problem. One factor however, which seems significant is that suicide rates are much higher for those who separate early from the military or separate under less than honorable conditions. This fact alone, underlines the importance of transition issues, of losing connection with our brothers in arms, and of finding oneself lost in a world we do not seem to fit in very well and we do not seem to be well equipped to survive and thrive.

A significant line of research, mostly based on statistical and epidemiological studies of suicide populations, focuses on risk and protective factors; that is, what are the factors or elements that render a person more vulnerable or likely to commit suicide versus the factors that tend to protect the person from it. While this research is helpful and promising in many respects, if fails in two fundamental aspects. The first one is clearly linked to the weakness of correlational studies; that an association exist between to variables, does not implies causation, it only suggests a relationship ( that a rooster crows at sunrise does not mean that the sun makes the rooster crows).  The second one is similar, that while a set of factors may predict a likely behavior from a member of a given population, it can’t never predict the behavior of a specific member of that population. For example, risk factors may tell us that soldiers who display those factors have a higher likelihood to hurt themselves, but it cannot tell us that a specific soldier, SGT Smith will do so.

Nevertheless, risk and protective factors are place to start in helping us think more concretely about suicide and in ways to prevent it from occurring.  Here is a short list of those factors.

Risk and Protective Factors

 

Risk Factors    Protective  Factors
 

Mental disorders

Prior history of suicidal behavior

Personality Disorders

Personality Traits (anger, impulsivity)

Hopelessness

Substance Use

Stressful life events (loss of job, partner)

Lack of Social Support

Single/divorced

Cognitive Problems

Chronic illnesses (Pain, TBI, etc)

Demographics (white, male )

Access to lethal means

Family history of mental illness

History of childhood abuse/neglect

 

 Social Support

Being Married

Religious affiliation

Character strengths

Life Satisfaction

Positive mood

Hope

Self-esteem

Meaning and purpose

Coping ability

Adaptability

Meaningfully employed.

Life goals

 

A quick look at this list may suggest some possible ways to minimize risk. Some factors are of course, impervious to change; we can’t alter our race and gender neither can we alter our lives’ histories. Who we are biologically, and what has happened to us, is determined and unchangeable. On the other hand, there are many factors we can change or modify which may enhance and enrich our lives and in doing so, protect us from self-destruction. Maintaining a sense of connection and belongings, fostering primary relationships, returning or coming to Faith, seeking professional help, taking care of our basic needs (employment, housing, etc) and developing life goals and purpose may be a place to start. There are no easy solutions, and even those actions we could take may not be completely under out control. Even our willingness, disposition and desire may be lacking. However, it is not the size of the problem, but the strength of our character that will carry the day; we need to believe that and commit ourselves to that ideal.

SPARTAN

 

 


Getting out of the military is hard!  Don’t make it harder on yourself by not being prepared!  Buy CONUS Battle Drills:  A Guide for Combat Veterans to Corporate Life, Parenthood, and Caging the Beast Inside!