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:
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