Two Things You Could Do Right Now To Help You Transition Later

I remember my parents always giving me advice and saying, “I wish someone would have told me this when I was your age.” Well, I am having one of those moments now. I’m currently transitioning from the military and I wanted to share two of the most significant lessons I’ve learned to date.

It is estimated that between 60-75% of today’s jobs are the result of professional networking. Awesome, but what does that mean? Well, it simply means people get other people jobs. In the military, a network is not crucial in order to land your next position. A strong network will help, and military personnel should build a network to aid in their career goals, but Uncle Sam will assign you job after job. Because of this, most military people don’t actively pursue a true professional network until they decide to leave the military and, by then, they may have missed out on great connections along the way.

Military personnel should network throughout their careers; with colleagues, civilians they encounter coordinating training, former classmates, and the funny salesman from the bar at the airport. If service members did this as astutely as our civilian counterparts, we would be more aware of trends in the job market, preferred positions, and desirable industries when we decide to leave active duty, and we would have the connections to fall into that 60-75% of people who land a killer job due to their network.

But having a good network is only part of the battle. Lets say you do have a network, and you landed an awesome interview because a former platoon mate of yours transitioned five years ago and hooked you up with his/her HR manager. Now you have the daunting task of explaining how your military experience can help a private sector organization. You hand the HR manager your resume. This resume is full of numbers: cost of equipment, number of soldiers you were responsible for, number of wells you built in Iraq, etc.

The major difference I see in my resume, or other military resumes, and those from private sector professionals is the quantifiable improvements. Private sector resumes will often say, “increased a function by 23%” or “achieved 5% month over month growth for the first six months.” The military does not quantify job performance the same as our civilian counterparts. We often lack the type of quantifiable bullets that employers are looking for when comparing applicants. We tend to quantify responsibility rather than quantify achievements and results.

I recommend that service members begin measuring more, even if it is not required for official counseling – and don’t hesitate to add this to your support forms. Pick a process or a metric of performance for your soldiers and measure progress. In many ways, stating that you increased team PT pass rate by 15% is better than saying responsible for having a PT pass rate of 90%. Showing that you increased it by 15% shows your accomplishment. Saying you were responsible for having a PT pass rate of 90% is questionable. What if the pass rate was 100% when you took control? Or what if it was 90%? These stastics would mean that things actually got worse, or stayed the same, under your control. The same is true for deployments; if you led 40 patrols, try to tie that to a result or focus on a process within the patrol that you improved to make those patrols more efficient. Look for ways to measure achievements and not just list responsibilities or duties. Many military personnel “improve their foxholes” instinctively and don’t pay attention to process improvement. However, focusing on this and capturing it in the moment will lead to a stronger resume.

There are little things I’ve learned here and there, but these were two places I was woefully deficient, and from conversations with other veterans it seems fairly common. Using LinkedIn or RallyPoint to build a network will help when it is time to find a job, and having a quality resume will ensure military applicants are competitive. Just like my parents told me, “don’t repeat my mistakes, learn from them.”