Education Series: Introduction to VA Programs

Maybe you have come out of the military and you are now looking for a career but you are having no luck finding one that fits. If this is you, then you may have come to the conclusion that you can’t get the job you want without first going to get a degree. So you decide to go back to school and use your GI Bill to get an education.

This is going to be my bread and butter on this blog. This is what I do, day in and day out I help veterans who have chosen to go back to school. Explaining how the GI Bill works and how you can use it to your advantage. Also I spend a lot of time explaining everything else that is available. From DoD programs to third party scholarships there are tons of opportunities for prior service members and their families.  Knowing where to find them and more importantly how to use them is going to be crucial getting the most out of the education system.

The GI Bill (VA Education Benefits)

Starting with the benefit most service members are aware of, but have no idea what it actually entails, the GI Bill. First things first, in the military there is the notion that the GI Bill encompasses everything the VA does for education. This is not the case at all, and if you don’t stop making this assumption you are going to come across as ignorant when you talk with the VA or an education official about VA education benefits. Also both parties will become extremely frustrated becasue of miscommunication. In fact that is the perfect term to use, VA Education Benefits; the VA offers VA Education Benefits, not just the GI Bill. These education benefits are part of your enlistment package. If you were to get a sign on bonus you would cash it, right? So cash the GI Bill in also, use it, don’t let it expire, and it does expire and will never come back.

At the time of this blog, there are 9 different VA education benefit programs. They are:

1.       Montgomery GI Bill – Active Duty

2.       Montgomery GI Bill – Select Reserve

3.       Post 9/11 GI Bill

4.       Reserve Education Assistance Program

5.       Veterans Retraining Assistance Program

6.       Vocational Rehabilitation

7.       Dependents & Survivors Education Assistance

8.       Post 9/11 Transfer

9.       Marine Gunnery Sgt John David Fry Scholarship

So we are looking 9 different programs, and only 3 of them are GI Bills the rest are different. You need to make note of that. I will be going over each one individually but I put links on each program to a VA factsheet, in case you want to learn more about them. The VA website on education benefits is extremely difficult to navigate. Not that I know a better solution for it, but it’s hard to find specific information, so be warned.

I’m going to finish out this blog with a small summary of each VA program and then I’ll come back later to get into more detail on each one with an individual blog per program.

Montgomery GI Bill – Active Duty

Designed for service members on an active duty contract who complete 2 or more years, this program can be referred to as Chapter 30, or MGIB-AD. It is simply a monthly housing allowance that is paid on the first of each month after school starts. IT DOES NOT PAY THE SCHOOL DIRECTLY. IT DOES NOT PAY FOR BOOKS. YOU WILL NOT SEE ANY MONEY UNTIL WELL AFTER CLASSES START. The amount you will receive will depend on your enrolled hours and the rate table set at the beginning of the fiscal year. The MHA is currently $1648/month for FY14.

Montgomery GI Bill – Select Reserve

Designed for service members on a 6 year Reserve/National Guard contract, this program can be referred to as Chapter 1606, or MGIB-SR. The same as MGIB-AD, this program is simply a monthly housing allowance that is paid on the first of each month after school starts. IT DOES NOT PAY THE SCHOOL DIRECTLY. IT DOES NOT PAY FOR BOOKS. YOU WILL NOT SEE ANY MONEY UNTIL WELL AFTER CLASSES START. The amount you will receive will depend on your enrolled hours and the rate table set at the beginning of the fiscal year. At $356/month for FY14, the payments are considerably less than the MGIB-AD

Post 9/11 GI Bill

Designed for service members (reserve or active) who complete at least 90 days of active duty service after 9/11/01. This program can be referred to as Chapter 33. This program is a three-tier cake it pays the tuition, the books and an E-5 w/dependents’ BAH. The catch here is that 90 days will open the program to you but the program is set on a percentage level. 90 days = 40%, 6 months =50%, 12 months 60%, and so on and so on. It will increase 10% every 6 months, until you reach 36 months then it will be at 100%. And before this goes any further, Basic Training and your job school DO NOT count as time served until you reach 2 years of other active duty time. So what I’m trying to say is no boots.

Post 9/11 is complicated and will receive its own blog. The percentage set everything the BAH, the amount they will pay the school and the book stipend. As complicated as it is though it is in my opinion the best benefit hands down.

Reserve Education Assistance Program

REAP as it is commonly referred, bridges the MGIB-SR and MGIB-AD payment gap for reservist and guardsmen who have deployed after 09/11/01. It came out prior to Post 9/11 and it is also on a percentage level. 6 months of active duty gets you 40%, 1 year = 60%, 2 years =80%. The percentage is based on the MGIB-AD payment. Also like MGIB-AD and MGIB-SR it only includes a MHA so your school will not be paid for, instead you will be paid to go to school. The biggest catch with REAP is that the active duty time has to be consecutive, it cannot be added together if you served multiple deployments.

Veterans Retraining Assistance Program

Part of the VOW initiative, VRAP, as it’s called, is available to unemployed veterans between 35-60 years old, who no longer have access to any other education benefits at the VA. Basically VRAP is a 12 month extension of MGIB-AD. The catch here is that you can only go to a community college with an approved VRAP program and it must be full time in the VA’s eyes. Oh and the program ends on March 32 st this year, in exactly one month.

Vocational Rehabilitation

Part of the VetSuccess program, VocRehab is designed to help disabled veterans get stable employment. Education is not the primary objective in this program. If it is determined by a caseworker that education is necessary for the veteran, then the veteran will be sent to school. The caseworker will monitor his grades and as long as everything goes well the VA will pick up the tab for tuition and any supplies.

Dependents and Survivors Education Assistance

A program that extends a Monthly Housing Allowance to dependents or spouses while in school. To qualify the veteran of the dependent/spouse has to be permanently and totally disabled from his time in service or KIA.

Post 9/11 Transfer

The name is exactly what it sounds like. A veteran can transfer the Post 9/11 (assuming he has it) to dependents. The catch? The veteran must re-enlist for 4 years on the day of transfer.

Marine Gunnery Sergeant John David Fry Scholarship

This scholarship is basically the Post 9/11 GI Bill for children of service members who die in the line of duty after 09/11/01.

 

 

Career Series: Finding a Career 2

Knowing where to look

After you find a career path, finding an available position should be the next goal. This is where things can get a little tricky. Career openings will be posted on company websites, classified ads and job search websites. However, those might not be the best options for you transitioning straight from the military into a career. Military preference is a term that is thrown around a lot when talking military to civilian transition. The VA and other federal agencies claim to have military preference, but it turns out to be some point system that appears to be leftover from a failed 1980s NES game. Nonetheless military preference is what you will have to look for, especially if you don’t have a degree.

Where are you going to find genuine military preference? Not some point system that makes absolutely no sense, but a real system that will take military experiences and educatiopn into consideration? Taking a look back at the CNAS report by Margaret C. Harrell and Nancy Berglass Employing America’s Veterans Perspectives from Businesses, from my last post, we can see that most employers recruit veterans at on-base events or Military Career Fairs.

In this chart we can see that close to 60% of companies interviewed said that  they hire veterans though events specifically designed for employers seeking veteran employees. Also we can see that only 17% use Employment Websites and 12% hire through web portals. So what does this all mean? Well, the report was written to help identify areas of focus for government and private agencies to enhance their programs designed to help veterans. While we are waiting, let’s take matters into our own hands.

When looking for a career you will double your odds of landing a position at a Career Fair rather than applying through a web portal (i.e. Monster, Indeed, etc.). So it will be exponentially better to prep a resume, get a suit, do some research and attend a job fair for a meeting with one company than it would to apply online for positions at 10 different companies. I don’t have a lot of inforamtion on why this works this way but from talking with veterans and my experience in Computer Programming I can make a few specualtions. I will explain.

Applying through online portals are fast and convienent. For this very reason, I assume that if I am going to send my application online that possible hundreds of other people have applied  for that position as well. When the company is receiving hundreds of applications it would not be economically feasiable to go through and schedule an interview for each applicant. Nor would it be justifiable to throughly review every application. The reason being is that there will be plenty of partially complete application, along with grossly unqualified applicants. So what should happen at this point is that the applications received are sent through a filter. A filter will only allow applications that meet a certain criteria set by the employer. If your application doesn’t have the keywords that they are looking for then your appplication will not make cut. Chances are that in a web portal open to the everyone is not going to give the military preference that you will need to successfully land a career.

The secodn revelation came when I recently spoke with my Fire Direction Officer from my deployment to Afghanistan. He had told me some information about his brother who was also an officer that was recently hired by a major oil industry company, Schlumberger. However, he had applied for the job prior to the career fair, with no Interestingly enough his brother was selected for interview at, of all places, a military career fair. Amazing, this stuff works. avail. My FDO told me that Schlumberger had sent a military recruiter out to the career fair. This is a crucial element for transitioning to the civilian world. Companies with set aside veteran recuriters are excellent resources, because they already recognize the skill transliation problem  and have gone a step further to set aside employees to translate the you skills.

Now when I started this blog I decided I wanted to help, really help, not just ramble on. But at the same time you are going to have to help yourself, I’m not going to get the job for you. So I’m going to post links to where you can find jobs fairs in your state. This isn’t going to take you to a SPAM site, or anything like that. These are legit career fair information sites to give you information on when the next job fair opens. Some states do not give a calendar, but ask you to call indivdual offcies to get a schedule: 

Alabama              Hawaii                   Massachusetts          New Mexico                South Dakota

Alaska                   Idaho                    Michigan                      New York                      Tennessee

Arizona                 Illinois                   Minnesota                  North Carolinia            Texas

Arkansas              Indiana                 Mississippi                  North Dakota               Utah

California             Iowa                      Missouri                       Ohio                              Vermont

Colorado              Kansas                  Montana                     Oklahoma                     Virginia

Conneticut          Kentucky             Nebraska                     Oregon                           Washington

Delaware             Louisiana             Nevada                        Pennsylvania               West Virgina

Florida                  Maine                   New Hampshire       Rhode Island                Wisconsin

Georgia                Maryland             New Jersey                South Carolina             Wyoming

Rant Blog - Veterans Need Careers

Hold the Parade, Veterans Need Careers

            Most people would say that veterans are held in high esteem. They are honored with numerous holidays, and thanked for their service. They are praised as heroes, and proclaimed as the defenders of freedom. They leave everything they have behind to fight for other nations and people whom they may never meet. Returning home, they are greeted by host of grateful citizens. On the very next day though, they will be forgotten. When the pedestal is torn down and the daily routines are picked back up, the service-member is left behind. I have been awakened to many of the injustices that veterans face as a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and a Veteran Services Coordinator in higher education. Prior service-members need more than holidays and parades.  Veterans should be given a better opportunity for stable employment.

            Skills translation is the number one reason a veteran is over looked by hiring managers. Veterans returning home from military service are immediately at a distinct disadvantage compared to their civilian counterparts. Their military experience does not translate well to the civilian world’s hiring managers.  Despite being familiar with the jargon from movies and video games, most hiring managers do not know what a “sergeant” really does. They do, however, know what a bachelor’s degree is. They also know that without one, the sergeant won’t get the job, regardless of his or her overqualifications.

            Veterans are also avoided by businesses because of the negative stereotypes sounding the military. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has become synonymous with soldier, sailor, marine, and airman. It is amazing at how quickly unqualified civilians can diagnose veterans with a psychological disorder. Overexposure to PTSD by the media has automatically programmed civilians to assume that most combat veterans are psychologically damaged. Statistics show that only thirty percent of the veterans, who have been exposed to combat, have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, leaving the majority of the military healthy. Those that do have a PTSD injury, seek treatment and are healed. Both facts the general public chooses to ignore.

In addition to PTSD stereotypes, veterans have another negative stereotype with which to contend. A stigma that “people only enlist in the military, because they could not do well in college” is rampant across educational institutions, and it is carried into the workforce. Despite the intense military training and the real world applications, veterans are still considered by most as uneducated. It can be easy to forget that in the 21^st century, military members are trained to operate GPS guided rocket systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and state-of-the-art computer systems. Instead, it’s much simpler to revert to delusional assumptions leftover from Vietnam. However, based on my experience in higher education, veterans are more likely to graduate earlier and with higher grades than that of their peers.

Veterans are our nation’s heroes. They leave home at a young age and return with handful of ribbons and lifetime of experience. They are praised, saluted, and forgotten. For many of them, however, they find themselves having to pick up where they left off after high school graduation. They are told that they do not have what it takes to enter the workforce. They have also given more to their country in four years than most citizens will do in their whole life. At the very least, they should be given a genuine opportunity at a stable career in return for their self-sacrificing service. 

           

Career Series: Finding a Career 1

Identify your career path by getting to know yourself

It sounds stupid and cheesy. You’ve probably heard it a thousand times “Do what you love, and love what you do.” As overused as it, there are still thousands of people who don’t listen to it. When working with military students, I see it all the time. My first correspondence with a new student usually goes something like this:

Me: “So, what are you wanting to study?”

Student: “I don’t know... nursing”

Me: “Why nursing?”

Student: “Because they make a lot of money.”

Me: “Who told you that?”

Student: “… … …”

Me: “Let’s take a look at some starting salaries in nursing and some starting salaries in plumbing.”

This happens at least once a week. I’m not sure what the deal is, but it seems that this generation is obsessed with the healthcare industry. Don’t get me wrong, the healthcare industry is important. There is also a shortage of healthcare staff, at least that’s what we hear. However, the next time you hear that pay close attention to the words. No one said there is a large number of vacant positions in healthcare waiting to be filled by the millions of healthcare students. They are just telling you there is a shortage of staff. Just because there is a high need for more positions doesn’t mean there are available positions. 

I pick on healthcare quite often, because it is, as I like to say, “The largest romanticized industry.” Romanticized industries are those that everyone dreams about. We all want to be doctors, lawyers, or CEOs. No one dreams about plumbing, carpentry, or mechanic. I found that interesting considering an entry level plumber makes significantly more than an entry level nurse. Don't take my word for it though, look it up.

When it comes to finding a career you need to be able to tell the difference between a job and a career. A lot of veterans jump into the civilian world and try to make careers out of jobs. You are going to fail. A job is a means to make some money. A career is a means to build your desired lifestyle. Trying to make a job into a career is like trying to shoot 40mm out of an M16, in the scenario that you could make it fire you don’t want to be anywhere near it.

Think about what industry you want to work in, and don’t think about the money. If you pick a field for the money you are taking a high risk. There's a good chance that you are going to be terrible at that career. Remember that a successful diesel mechanic will always make more money than a mediocre nurse jumping from hospital to hospital.

If you can’t find a field that you want to work in, then you are probably over thinking it. Figure out what you would be doing for fun. Ask yourself, “What do I do when I can do whatever I want?” Find a career that is related to those things, and be creative. Even if all you can think of is “I drink, play video games, and workout.” Then look into breweries, nightlife, Microsoft or Sony, and the gym industry. One of those areas is more than a job, one is your career. GIJOBS is a great magazine for getting ideas and seeing what's happening for service members after the military.If you can find any let me know, I am literally buried in them and wouldn't mind sending you some issues. 

If you are still coming at a loss with your career path don’t panic. You can always jump into one those “I don’t know who I am” programs on the internet. Watch out for SPAM monsters though they are every where. Try something like this one from the VA, CareerScope.

There are some other things you can do to help realize who you are as a person and what kind of career you might be successful in. This is more about how other people view you, instead of how you might view yourself. Like hearing yourself talking in a recording for the first time, sometimes we are strangers to ourselves. I recommend the assessment tool at www.iVETx.com. It will tell you some of you personality strengths, and some things you should probably work on. I was absolutely blown away at how accurate mine was when I took it. When you get the right industry you could fall out if you are stuck in the wrong department. Find out what your civilian pros and cons are and exploit them to your advantage to make sure that when you do get the career you position yourself to fly up the ladder.

Know what you are up against

In June 2012, CNAS released a report by Margaret C. Harrell and Nancy Berglass Employing America’s Veterans Perspectives from Businesses. Finally! Some insight to what’s going on when the application is thrown in the trash, and the generic “thanks, but no thanks” letters are sent out by potential employers. The report discloses CNAS’ findings after interviewing 69 companies on why they hire veterans and why they don’t. In the end the summary comes out with some recommendations about what Congress, DOD, DOL and DVA should do to assist veterans looking for a career. These recommendations are pretty good, but what about now? What do we do while we are waiting for government intervention? Let’s take a look at what we can do to use this information to our advantage:

Skills Translation

The number one reason the door never opens, is miscommunication. From my previous blog, Day 1 in the 1^st CivDiv, I mentioned that you are going to have to learn to talk civilian to make an easy transition. Well, according to these statistics over 60% of employers interviewed said that translation was why they would pass over a veteran applicant. Civilian Talk is important, it’s really important. Use websites like www.vaforvets.com or www.nrd.gov to find an effective way to translate your military training into something that an HR manager can understand. When you send them a resume full of military jargon, you might as well get some crayons and draw a picture that shows you doing the job instead. They aren’t going to take the time try and decipher LANDNAV instructor, CQB2, and E-4 RTO, so you need to do it for them. 

The Stereotypes

This one is tough, you are going to have to deal with these in a much more creative way. There are several misconceptions that the civilian world has when they hear the word “veteran.” Some people have been brainwashed by the media so that as soon as they hear “veteran” they immediately think PTSD. Former President Bush addressed this well  at the Dallas Summit on Feb 19 2014. Whether you have PTSD or not, there isn’t much you can do from your end to fight this stereotype. Being mindful of body language and word choice in an interview, is about the full extent of breaking down this stereotype. Be professional, don't lose your bearing even over something that is legitimately upsetting. If you do everyone around you, immediately transforms into a licensed psychiatrist and you become their first patient. The "it must be the PTSD" whispers will follow you right out of the interview. As long as mega-media outlets pop out PTSD stories every other day, this will be a stereotype with which you will have to contend. 

The second largest stereotype is left over from the Vietnam Era. In the civilian world, more so in the younger generation, exists this little assumption that to join the military is to admit you aren't capable of college. I have several former high school friends, who decided when I joined. They will quickly forget about the HIMARS, Drones, large scale coordination in assaults, and state-of-the-art communication systems of today’s military. The good news here is that this one is easy to debunk, just use portfolio. You can build an impressive one based on your accomplishments in the military. Take your MarineOnline, AKO Correspondence or equivalent certificates and build a what I call a “look at how awesome I am" book and take it with you when you get called to an interview. Marines, you will be surprised at how far you can stretch the “personal financial management” certificate.

Skills Mismatch

Skills mismatch falls in hand with Skills Translation. However, if you still cannot land the career after you translate your skills, it may be time to look into going back to school. But before you do make sure to at least land a job, doesn't have to be $20/hr but at least something. I will get more into this in the education series. I’m sorry if I’m the first one to tell you this but just in case you haven’t heard, the Gi Bill isn’t a panacea for college financial matters. Not even close. Standby for more on this in the education blogs.

Acclimation

I skipped deployments, because the USERRA has your back there. If you don't them then look them up. I’m going to skip "Finding Veterans" as well because at this point you can find the employer.

Onward to Acclimation, the report describes this as employers avoiding veterans their first few months out because they haven’t been properly “acclimated” to the civilian world yet. To me, I find this offensive, and it probably belongs in negative stereotypes category, but that would put the negative stereotype category somewhere way into the 80-90% range, and we can't have that can we? So what can you do to battle this stereotype? Everything mentioned above. Learn to talk the talk, put together a portfolio, and present yourself in a professional manner no one can say that you haven't “acclimated” to the civilian world, because by then you have pretty much become an expert.