Military expertise needed

US: Soldiers returning from Iraq may be highly skilled and highly disciplined, but they are finding it hard to get civilian jobs back home. They feel they don’t have the skills necessary for today's modern workplace. But they are wrong.

“Me being a paratrooper, what kind of jobs are out there in the private sector?” asks Christian Rhoad, who is still unemployed several years after leaving the army. He served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. Rhoad told The Sun News that he has done some work in the construction industry, but that he is keen to learn new skills. “I can learn to do anything,” he says.

Professor Mike Haynie of Syracuse University believes the returning veterans do have useful skills, but they are not selling them in the right way to the private sector. Haynie runs The Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities, a non-profit organization that provides advice and training programmes for disabled veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He believes that employers don’t realize that the knowledge and experience gained in the military are also useful in the workplace, partly because the veterans don’t translate their skills into a language that civilians can understand.

Employers will clearly find it hard to employ someone who was a tank operator if they have no tanks, Haynie explained to Ridgewood Patch, an online local newspaper. It’s difficult for them to see how tank-operating skills can be used in a civilian job, Haynie says. It’s up to the veterans to explain that a tank driver actually has received intensive training and has a number of transferable skills, such as practical knowledge in hydraulics systems, radar systems and electronics.

Michelle Obama on military veterans

"That commitment to helping others – that doesn't just disappear when they return to civilian life."

First Lady Michelle Obama would also like to see more companies employing military veterans. In her closing speech at this year’s annual meeting of The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), formed in 2005 by former US President Bill Clinton to fight global poverty, Obama focused not on global poverty, but on veterans. She called on companies to give veterans a chance in civilian life and urged international organizations working in disaster areas to see the potential in the veterans’ skills, which she claimed were "woefully underutilized".

Such companies should make more use of people with military training and expertise, she argued. "That passion for serving, that commitment to helping others – that doesn't just disappear when they return to civilian life.”