One Thing That Is Going Right for Veterans

Every day seems to bring more bad news for vet­er­ans. But amid the ever-grow­ing scan­dal at the Vet­er­ans Af­fairs De­part­ment, there is one thing go­ing right: Many more vet­er­ans are get­ting jobs.

The un­em­ploy­ment rate for Ir­aq and Afgh­anistan vet­er­ans, which now stands at 5.3 per­cent, is at its low­est point in nearly six years. Un­em­ploy­ment levels for these new­er vet­er­ans peaked at 15.2 per­cent in 2011.

And this fol­lows a lar­ger trend with­in the over­all vets pop­u­la­tion. Un­em­ploy­ment rates for all vet­er­ans dropped to 5 per­cent in May, down from a peak of 9.8 per­cent in 2011, ac­cord­ing to the Bur­eau of Labor Stat­ist­ics.

“It’s im­port­ant to re­cog­nize this con­tinu­ing down­ward trend for vets over­all, and par­tic­u­larly for post-9/11 vets,” said Jac­queline Maf­fucci, the re­search dir­ect­or for the Ir­aq and Afgh­anistan Vet­er­ans of Amer­ica ad­vocacy group. “But we also can’t de­clare vic­tory just yet.”

A key reas­on for the dra­mat­ic im­prove­ment is that non­profits have poured more re­sources in­to job pro­grams for vet­er­ans. The ef­forts in­clude help­ing vet­er­ans find work that matches their skills and teach­ing them to trans­late their mil­it­ary ex­per­i­ence in­to ci­vil­ian-friendly terms on their résumés.

“All of these hir­ing pro­grams have worked to some de­gree. … They res­ult in the hir­ing of tens of thou­sands, if not hun­dreds of thou­sands, of these men and wo­men,” said Phil­lip Carter, a seni­or fel­low at the Cen­ter for a New Amer­ic­an Se­cur­ity, a de­fense think tank.

Mean­while, dozens of com­pan­ies have teamed up to pledge more than 1 mil­lion jobs for vet­er­ans, in­clud­ing such ma­jor cor­por­a­tions as Wal-Mart Stores and JP­Mor­gan Chase.

But with more jobs pledged than there are un­em­ployed vet­er­ans from the Ir­aq and Afgh­anistan wars to fill them, why aren’t all of these vet­er­ans now in the work­force?

“There’s still not a per­fect fit between these jobs and the vet­er­ans seek­ing jobs. “¦ And there’s also a nat­ur­al level of un­em­ploy­ment and fric­tion in the trans­ition pro­cess that will al­ways be there,” Carter said.

Dan Golden­berg serves as ex­ec­ut­ive dir­ect­or for the Call of Duty En­dow­ment, which of­fers fin­an­cial sup­port to job-place­ment pro­grams that help vet­er­ans find work. He de­scribes the is­sue of out-of-work vet­er­ans as a prob­lem of sup­ply and de­mand. The sup­ply side: Vet­er­ans have to be ready to join the ci­vil­ian job mar­ket. The de­mand? Ad­voc­ates worry there is a gap between well-in­ten­tioned CEOs pledging to bring more vet­er­ans on board and the per­son who makes the fi­nal hir­ing de­cision.

“They really struggle, be­cause the people pulling the trig­ger are hir­ing man­agers,” Golden­berg said. “”¦ [Hir­ing man­agers could won­der]: ‘Do they have enough of the right ex­per­i­ence, or [do they have] com­bat-re­lated bag­gage? This vet­er­an doesn’t look like the type of per­son I’m used to hir­ing.”¦ Now you’re ask­ing me to take on a pro­ject.’ That’s what we really worry about a lot, be­cause the stor­ies be­ing told about vet­er­ans are all about dam­aged goods.”

More than 80 per­cent of the 69 com­pan­ies sur­veyed by the Cen­ter for New Amer­ic­an Se­cur­ity in a 2012 study named two or more chal­lenges to hir­ing vet­er­ans. Al­most 60 per­cent poin­ted to chal­lenges trans­lat­ing mil­it­ary skills to a ci­vil­ian ca­reer as well as to a neg­at­ive per­cep­tion of vet­er­ans. Case in point: the flood of vet­er­an sui­cide and men­tal-health stor­ies that flooded me­dia after the Fort Hood shoot­ing.

“I think that our so­ci­ety has proven time and time again that ste­reo­types are dan­ger­ous and wrong and shouldn’t be ap­plied to a large group of people,” said Lauren Au­gustine, a le­gis­lat­ive as­so­ci­ate with the Ir­aq and Afgh­anistan Vet­er­ans of Amer­ica.

The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has its own trans­ition as­sist­ance pro­gram, known as TAP, to help vet­er­ans ease back in­to the ci­vil­ian job mar­ket. But some ar­gue that TAP — an in­ter­agency part­ner­ship in­clud­ing the Labor, De­fense, and Vet­er­ans Af­fairs de­part­ments — doesn’t go far enough.

The latest it­er­a­tion of TAP — rolled out in fisc­al 2013 — is man­dat­ory for all sol­diers be­fore they leave the mil­it­ary. It in­cludes a three-day work­shop with the Labor De­part­ment in which sol­diers get tips for writ­ing a résumé and go­ing to a job in­ter­view.

Sol­diers also meet with the VA to dis­cuss po­ten­tial dis­ab­il­ity and edu­ca­tion be­ne­fits — in­clud­ing the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which helps vet­er­ans af­ford col­lege. And TAP re­quires ser­vice mem­bers to cre­ate a trans­ition plan, in which they must out­line a strategy to reach their goals after leav­ing the mil­it­ary.

But crit­ics say there is still more work that can be done to bet­ter pre­pare troops.

“The TAP pro­gram has made some mod­est im­prove­ments.”¦ It’s not as sig­ni­fic­ant as these jobs pledges and these pub­lic-private part­ner­ships,” Carter said. “”¦ The fun­da­ment­al flaw with TAP is that you can’t undo two years or four years or 20 years of the mil­it­ary with one week of Power­Point.”

The Pentagon could help sol­diers ad­just to work­ing in the ci­vil­ian world by al­low­ing great­er co­oper­a­tion with out­side or­gan­iz­a­tions be­fore they sep­ar­ate from the mil­it­ary, Carter said.

One ex­ample of this is at Joint Base Lewis-Mc­Chord near Ta­coma, Wash., where ser­vice mem­bers can en­roll in an ar­ray of ap­pren­tice­ship pro­grams across the coun­try as they pre­pare to leave the mil­it­ary.

And more in­ter­ac­tion with ci­vil­ians be­fore leav­ing the ser­vice could help bridge what vet­er­ans point to as a ci­vil­ian-mil­it­ary di­vide. It could also help them bal­ance their job ex­pect­a­tions.

Jim Reed, who spent 27 years in the Army be­fore re­tir­ing, said that he real­ized after get­ting out of the mil­it­ary that his seni­or­ity didn’t carry over in­to his ci­vil­ian job as a nurse an­es­thet­ist.

“I had as­cen­ded to kind of a mid­level man­age­ment sys­tem….Then I get out, and there is none of that without re­lo­cat­ing all over the place,” he said. “… That was a bit of a tough­er pill for me to swal­low.”

Des­pite the prom­ising re­cent drop in un­em­ploy­ment, vet­er­ans ad­voc­ates know they have to stay fo­cused on find­ing jobs for those re­turn­ing from ser­vice. They warn that vet­er­ans un­em­ploy­ment levels could eas­ily spike again, as the month-to-month un­em­ploy­ment num­bers for Ir­aq and Afgh­anistan have re­sembled something of a roller coast­er.

That worry is com­poun­ded by the surge in vet­er­ans that is com­ing with the draw­down in Afgh­anistan, with ap­prox­im­ately 20,000 troops be­ing pulled out by the end of the year. And more ser­vice mem­bers could be forced out the mil­it­ary due to budget cuts over the next five years as well.

“We’re really con­cerned about it,” Golden­berg said. “… The eco­nomy is now go­ing to see a dif­fer­ent kind of vet­er­an — one who had planned on a mil­it­ary ca­reer and — not through any fault of their own — is sud­denly on the job mar­ket.”