7 Things Every Military Person Can Sell about Himself

January 10th, 2012

Many times when I speak at TAP & ACAP seminars someone from the class raises his hand and says, “I don’t have a technical background.  What do I have to offer employers from my military service?”  This is a great question that every transitioning person needs to know how to address, and I believe that lack of confidence in this area is why the unemployment rate among young veterans is so high.  You can’t understand how to answer this questions without understanding both the challenges of employers and your competition.  So what are employers looking for that is so hard to find?

1.  Solid Character Traits. That’s right.  You learned it at home, and you developed it in the military.  You show up on time, every time.  You understand what looking professional means, and you’ve been expected to behave in a way that reflects well on your branch of service.  You know how to work with people from all types of backgrounds.  You work until the job is done and not until the whistle blows, and you take pride in what you do.  You are accountable, and you have an idea of what needs to be done to lead people.

Talk to any manager in a business or his human resources person, and he will tell you that the vast majority of firings are as a result of poor character traits.  People don’t show up on time for work; they are lazy; they steal; they can’t work with people; they are disease to the organization.  Most of these same employers understand that 80% of the people they interview for a job have the skill set to do the job, and that means that most of the interview process is spent trying to rid out the bad apples.  People of poor character cause managers huge headaches and frequently make them look bad.  Beyond that, they cost businesses money.  Nobody wants that.  Show an employer how you will take this pain away from him as evidenced by your military background, and you’ve scored a big hit.

2.  Accountability. If there is one thing that active duty military service teaches everyone is that there is a price to be paid for screwing up.  Taking responsibility for failures is never comfortable, and it shouldn’t ever be.  Failure is useful only when we use it to drive us ahead or when we use it to motivate us to prevent its occurrence.  Don’t show up for work some day, lose a stripe.  Don’t do your work for the day, get assigned extra duty.  Don’t show up for duty for a month, go to jail.  Most of your civilian peers haven’t learned accountability the way you have.  You’ve probably noticed that your friends from high school don’t seem as mature as you are, or maybe someone else has noticed how much you’ve changed for the better.  What they are seeing is your accountability.  Show an employer that you understand how important it is to be accountable as you were in the military, and they will be thrilled to meet you.

3.  You Took the Path Less Traveled. Every military member has heard it from the folks back home:  “I could never do what you’re doing.”  And you know what?  They’re right.  You volunteered to accept a rigorous life where you lost all your hair (ok, just the men on this one), potentially risked your life for our country, accepted restrictions on your liberty, traveled away from home for months at a time, and accepted a much stricter set of laws (the UCMJ) to govern your life.  Regardless of your reasons for joining, you still volunteered to do something that was more difficult than anyone else did.  Show an employer that you’ll take on the tough jobs just like you did when you joined the military, and she will love you.

4.  You Are Trainable. Before you could enlist, you had to take the ASVAB.  The test measures your technical aptitude, but more importantly, it measures your capability for training.  If you had no ability to be developed, then you wouldn’t have been able to enlist.  The Armed Forces is the only industry in America where everybody is trained from day #1.  You are expected to learn and apply knowledge constantly.  You have to develop qualifications, study for advancement exams, go to training schools, and more.  The military requires you to move up or move out so continuous personal development comes with the process.  Documented willingness and ability to be developed is not something that employers see every day.  Show an employer you are eager to learn, and you will have their ear.

5.  You want to grow. Because you are willing and able to be trained, you are also in a position to meet the goals that come with greater responsibility.  How far you can go is going to be based on your work performance, how much you’re willing to develop yourself, and what natural abilities you have; but at some level, all of us want to be able to do more (and get paid more, too, right?).  Employers like to hire people who want to grow, and every military member can demonstrate his personal initiative to grow and take on more roles.  Show an employer that you want to grow to do more for him, and he will give you a chance to prove it.

6.  You Know How to Follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). It doesn’t matter what you do on active duty, you can be certain that there is some type of regulation that governs how it’s done.  Regulations, SOPs, and other types of work instructions create consistent systems for accomplishing work, and it’s the basis of every company’s quality systems.  The fact that you’ve worked in that environment puts you a leg up on everyone who has never worked that way.  Owners and managers rely on business systems for their growth.  Show them that you understand the value of SOPs and how to align yourself to them, and that will separate you from the crowd.  If the company doesn’t have them for their processes, you may be able to offer them value in helping them to create SOPs and other work instructions.

7.  You Know How to Look Professional and Be Professional. This is the essence of what it means to serve in the Armed Forces, and maintaining a positive and professional image is vital for any company.  Take that part of the military with you.  Avoid the piercings, excessive ink, and long hair (men).  In social settings this may be great, but it adds no value in the work environment.  To an employer, these are distractions unless you work for OC Choppers or Jesse James.  Your employers customers expect your employer to be professional, and if you look professional, the probabilities are much higher that you will be professional.

Bonus:  You are drug free, or at least you should be. Nearly every major employer does preemployment drug screens these days, and drug use among the working populace has derailed many a job offer.  Hair tests are common these days and can detect illegal drug use for up to 9 months in your past.  Emphasize to an employer your commitment to the military’s stand on drug use, and you will give her confidence that this new hire will sail right through the preemployment checks and reflect well on her.

Marketing yourself with these 7 strengths will give you an edge that sets you apart from the vast majority of the people trying to get the same job you want.  Of course if you’re not doing these things on active duty, now is the time to get smart on doing things the right way because these are the things that employers want from every employee but so frequently can’t get.

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The Will to Win Is Nothing Without the Will to Prepare

December 29th, 2011

Think about it.  We all want to win in whatever endeavor we choose.  We’ve all wanted to be Michael Jordan, A-Rod,  Tom Brady, Jack Welch, or some other person who has been at the very top of their game.  So why don’t we get there?  Sure, talent is a part of it.  No matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to hit the fade-away jump shot like Michael Jordan used to or be able to thread double coverage & hit the Wes Welker on a crossing route 30 yards down field like Tom Brady, but we don’t have to be the very best in our field in order to win every time.  We just have to be better than our direct competition.  So how does this apply to finding your first job out of the military or any job for that matter?  That’s easy.  Here are 4 simple steps you can take to make sure you’re ready to win your career transition.

1.  Winning starts long before game day when nobody is watching. You didn’t see Jordan in high school shooting free throws after everyone had left practice for the day, and you didn’t see A-Rod working on his batting year round when he was a kid.  All we see is game day.  If you wait for game day to prepare, the results will be disastrous, and the same can be said for your career transition.   The fact that you’re reading this blog is a good first step, but take the time to prepare.  Preparing for a job search campaign means taking the time to know where you’ve made an impact and what you can do for someone.  Research the numbers associated with your job.   You also need to prepare for interview questions, research companies & jobs that are a fit, keep appropriate interview attire at the ready, tune up your initial image to outsiders (email address, social media presence, ring-back tones, voice messages, etc), and more. There are a number of great resources, including this website, that can help you figure out all the specifics that you need to do in advance of your actual search.  What’s important now is that you make the commitment to do the work.

Yes, doing all the homework and little things when no one is watching can be a lot of work especially the first time you have to do it, but your efforts can bring about your own peace of mind, better career satisfaction through better options, and thousands of dollars per year in extra income.  Surely those benefits alone are worth the effort.

It also means asking a lot of questions from people who know because…

2.  Unless you’re starting something totally new, you can find a path to follow. I learned executive recruiting for military-experienced individuals by following the lead of those who were already successful.  Don’t recreate the wheel if you don’t have to.  If you are making a military-to-civilian career transition, there are dozens of people with whom you can consult.  Talk to people in your command who have recently left the military and talk to them about their experiences.  Ask them what they did that was beneficial and what they would do differently next time to get better results.  Use the base TAP/ACAP office.  These professionals have experience helping people just like you across the threshold every day, and they have a network of contacts to help.  Many books have been written for the military job seeker–use them.  They will give you great insight into the nuts and bolts of the job search process that will work for you.

And of course, talk to military placement firms like Absolutely American, Inc. because…

3.  Behind every great player, there is a great coach. If you think finding a job for yourself is tough, try finding one for someone else and getting the new employer to pay you to do it.  That’s what the military placement firms do every day, and they don’t get paid at all unless they’re successful in getting someone a job.  The reason that’s important is that you should test the credentials of who is giving you advice.  These are the people who work a the highest levels of the job search process.  For example, your high school football coach isn’t going to be able to give you the best advice in the NFL just like your buddies aren’t going to be able to give you the best advice in your job search.  Though peers and supervisors can give you some important information like an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, they don’t look for jobs professionally so they wouldn’t be the experts in that.  Ask a recruiter at a military placement firm or one of the TAP/ACAP professionals to coach you on how to prepare for your transition because the advice you get from them is being used in the market every day.  You will be surprised how much good advice you can get from a profession if you just take the initiative to ask and follow through.  If you can’t find someone like this, then use your network to find someone who has been successful in growing his/her career through job changes.

The key phrase is “successful in growing his/her career” because…

4.  You’ve got to have a well thought-out game plan. I assure you that anyone who has grown their career successfully in today’s “free agent” world has made a number of job changes, and those who are successful at this have had a plan.  They understand very well that the work you do today pays off tomorrow, and though they are dedicated to their current job & employer in doing their best every day, they know that growing a career requires a plan.  The military-to-civilian transition you’re making is a part of growing your career.  A good game plan includes taking the time to learn how you can leverage your current situation to improve it in the future.  For the most part, your game plan should be broken down into long-term, short-term, and immediate goals that you can use to build today’s work list. I would also encourage you to take the time think about what you want from your life overall and not just from a job, and take the time to get input from the important people in your life.  Though Jack Welch was arguably the most successful CEO in the 2nd half of the 20th century, he has been married and divorced 3 times.  There’s a lesson in that.

Bonus.  This will not be your last career transition. Most of the military members I see in transition are so fixated on the challenge of converting their very predictable 1st & 15th into a civilian career that they forget that this is the first step in the process and not the last.  Make sure your transition plan includes looking at the next step in your career.  If you take the time to put together a good plan, do your homework, focus your effort, and execute your plan, then you are going to get job offers. I can tell you why that is, but that’s a topic for another post.  Therefore it’s not just about getting a job but mostly its about getting a job that fits your life’s plan.  At a minimum, the job you take needs to be able to affirm the following question:

“Will this job make me more valuable to my current employer AND other employers that fit my life’s plan after 1 year of service?”

If it does, it may be a good fit, but you have to prepare yourself well in advance to answer the question.  Nothing great has ever happened on the fly.  Great results always start with a plan and diligent preparation.

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ONE WORD TO REMOVE FROM YOUR VOCABULARY

September 13th, 2011

“Retired” That’s right. Get rid of it, now! I know that after 20 years of military service you’ve earned the right to be called retired, but if you want to get a job after military service with anyone other than a federal government contractor, I suggest changing the way you describe your military career.

The problem lies in the image that the word “retired” creates in people who aren’t serving on active duty, and the picture looks like this: Old, used up, finished, slow, bad fishing hats, perpetual right turn signal–you get the picture. When your civilian peers think of retirement, they see the end of a productive life and not someone in his late 30s to mid 40s. In other words, they don’t see a healthy and energetic leader in the prime of his life.

Effective sales people use words to paint pictures for their prospect that influence their prospect’s decision making–the more vivid and appropriate the picture, the better the result. If you haven’t realized that the job search process is a marketing and sales process, let me be the first to welcome you to a new and more effective way of thinking. If you want to create a positive image for your brand that you can take to the job market, focus on using words that create the right impression for employers, and a great first step in the process is to remove any descriptions of you that could create a negative picture in your prospective employer’s mind. Getting rid of the “R-word” is a great first step.

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TO NEGOTIATE OR NOT TO NEGOTIATE…

September 1st, 2011

Salary negotiations are one of the most difficult subjects for transitioning military members to understand and manage.  The anxiety and emotional stress caused by the whole transition process that ends with evaporation of the ever-reliable certainty of a military pay chart and paydays on the 1st & 15th stimulates actions from excess greed through pure desperation and everything in between.  When you consider that many military members entered the service with nothing but an overnight bag and leave with houses, spouses, and kids, cars, pets and more, the prospect of how much a person is going to get paid in the first civilian job has serious implications.  Add to the fact that a 2-term enlistee or junior officer are frequently now 26-30 years old and going through this process for the first time doesn’t make this any easier, and if you’re finishing a full career in the miltary, it’s even worse.  In another post, I’ll cover how to create your value with a prospective employer, but for this post, we’re just going to discuss the specific issue of how to handle the “salary negotiation.”

The first problem in dealing with this issue is the term “negotiation” itself.  For most people, the term “negotiation” immediately conjures up images of the last used car purchase or a transaction with a street vendor in many foreign countries.  Whether you enjoy these types interactions or not, I think that everyone agrees that the process is contentious at best and combative at their worst.  Neither of these scenarios is particularly appealing when you’ve already got enough stress just trying to find a job.  So my first key to creating success in this process is to dump another “N-word” from your vocabulary because your counterpart doesn’t see the process of establishing your compensation level as a negotiation at all.  As with nearly everything, this philosophy doesn’t apply in every case, but it does apply in nearly all of the ones a transitioning military member will face–at least for those members who don’t wear stars on their collars.  So below are 6 key points to remember when working to establish your compensation level with an employer.

1.  A potential employer is infinitely more concerned with maintaining the perception of equity for the role you are filling in his organization than paying you what you are worth. Salary equity is a term that is used frequently in HR circles.  This doesn’t mean that employers don’t care about what you are worth.  It just means that the last thing they want is to hire someone from the outside into a role at a level that their current employees would consider “unjustifiably high.”  This causes headaches for management and HR that nobody wants and could cost your new employer untold thousands of dollars trying to smooth things over with existing staff.  Even though most companies don’t want you to talk with coworkers about your compensation rate, they know that you will at some point, and that’s where the problem lies.

2.  You maximum pay rate will only be as much your employer can justify for both the role and your qualifications. For every established position, there is a pay range, and every pay range has a “midpoint.”  In the case of “experienced hires,” many employers try to hire a new employee close to that midpoint.   Yes, they have a little wiggle room around those midpoints, but it’s not a lot.  And sometimes, they can put you into a higher band if they can justify it.  Your ability to wiggle to the high side of the range is going to have everything to do with the way you position your value during the interview process.

3.  No matter how much the employer likes you, the employer believes that there are other acceptable alternatives. This is especially true during periods of higher unemployment (usually defined as anything above 6.5%).  If you push an employer too hard, he will walk away.  When you push too hard, the employer starts to see the interaction with you as a used car/street vendor haggle, and frankly, that’s a turn-off for most people–especially when you are dealing with human resources professionals and managers below the executive suite.  Few Americans like hard-core negotiating.  It causes them stress, and most frequently, they will move away from it and you if your discussions go that way.  Remember, people hire people they like.  Pushing this too hard lowers your “likability factor.”

4.  By the time you get to the offer, your opportunity to sell your value is nearly used up. The offer becomes the manifestation of the value you’ve created for yourself before you get to this point.  Good recruiting firms understand this and will work with you and for you to help establish your value before you get to this point.  Nowadays, the offer is the end game and not go-time.  It would be good to remember that your value (and potential compensation) is being adjusted in the mind of an employer with every interaction you have with them.  In my experience, it is very uncommon to get an offer increased by more than 5-10% once it’s released, and I have studied this in detail and have been doing this nearly every day for over a decade.

5.  There aren’t a lot of negotiable items in an offer these days, but you can ask for items that are. Even if you have health care coverage through a spouse or military, that doesn’t mean that you can get the full value transferred to your salary.  Sometimes you can get a little, but I’ve never seen more than $200 per month offered.  Companies negotiate group rates on health insurance based upon maximum participation.  Though not participating may save the company some money in the short run, a lower participation rate makes future premium negotiations more difficult.  You may be able to get an extra week of vacation, a salary review at predetermined date, relocation assistance (even if you’re already in the area), money to bridge gaps in health care coverage, performance bonuses, or similar; but these items will be relatively small and very temporary in most cases.  If you are offered cash assistance of some type, you can as for it as a “net payment.” In this case, the employer anticipates the tax consequence and adds that to the gross.  If you accept an offer as written, your new employer may be willing to help with some of these items because they are one-time short-term costs that are “below the radar” of existing employees.  Most professional-level employees understand that “sweeteners” are part of the new hire process in many cases.

6.  Your total equivalent compensation in the military is irrelevant to most employers. The equivalency charts you see are nice guides the military uses to sell you on staying in the service, and the truth is that the numbers these days are pretty impressive–and real.  But civilian employers don’t look at your compensation as market rate in their industry unless you are going to work for a government contractor, but that industry has hazards of its own.  Military pay has outpaced civilian pay raises over the past 11 years, and any time you change industries, there is an opportunity cost that is reflected in compensation.  In the 1990s, compensation was a big reason to leave the service.  Today it’s not.  If you have maintain the earnings you had on active duty, you may want to consider remaining on active duty.  However, nobody in Corporate America is going to put you in harm’s way, force you deploy, or throw you in jail for not coming to work either.  Freedom has a price.

So when you receive an offer from a company where you would like to work, first show gratitude.  Your manager has risked his reputation to make the offer to you in hopes that your work will ease his pain and produce a solid return on investment.  Remember, your new employer is betting that your performance will match what you represented during the hiring process.  Be your professional best so they don’t regret their decision.  Then if you need a little more base salary or some sweeteners, appeal to their nature to help you make it easier to say “yes” by some small concessions.  And of course, be extra thankful when they are provided.

The employer-employee relationship needs to stay in balance.  If after time, you have outproduced your role and compensation, it’s OK to have a conversation down the road, and one of the best parts about being a civilian is that you can leave if a better opportunity presents itself.  That is one of the freedoms you’ve worked so hard to protect, and it’s part of what keeps Corporate American in balance.

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Why doesn’t military experience equal a bachelors degree?

August 22nd, 2011

Sometimes it does.  It depends on the job and the objectives that the employer has for the person who fills the position.  If a position is targeted for growth within the company, quite frequently a bachelors degree is required because future management positions will not be possible without the degree.  Other times, the employer will accept experience in lieu of a degree for the right person because the focus of the position is not on growth but immediate and sustained performance in the job.

The error in this thinking comes from a misunderstanding of the purpose of a bachelors degree.  Bachelors degrees are a benchmark certification for someone’s ability to think critically and communicate effectively through speech and writing.  This is the purpose of all those “general education” credits that many people like to “pencil whip” and feel are a worthless part of their education.  That is why a bachelors degree is generally the price of entry for an upwardly-mobile leadership position in a company.  The employer wants to know (from a 3rd party) that you can think through complex issues and communicate with people at least at a basic level.  Basic military service and work experience alone offer little to give an outsider confidence of your abilities in these areas.  It has nothing to do with fair.  A person just needs to know what one gets from both, and largely we have lost sight of that in America.

The problem with the bachelors degree over the past 30 years or so is that it has been watered down to the point where its basic value is becoming questionable.  The quality of the degree and educational institution (generally evaluated by the difficulty level) have become more significant benchmarks for the above than the degree itself, which is why you have so many college grads working at McDonalds or tending bar.

Of course, the great misconception that started all of this is, “You have to get a bachelors degree to have a successful life”– a concept started within government sources and repeated by people who have a vested interest in building that system.  The misconception has been further repeated by well-intentioned people who are not really sure why they are repeating it except that they heard someone else say it (so therefore it must be true).

In order to be successful, you must build your own cash-producing assets.  A good bachelors degree can be one of those assets that creates value.  A 2.0 GPA in a lousy degree area is not worth much to anyone except the institution who happily took your cash and the bank who loaned you the money for school.  Your asset could also be hands-on technical skill, work ethic, creativity, experience, or tangible assets (like a business or real estate).  Don’t get me wrong. Education is important, but self improvement in a personal area of income-production can take a lot of forms.  For example, carpenters can learn how bid jobs and manage a business to increase their income capacity from their basic trade skill.  Those skills open the “mere carpenter” to more job options in the less physical side of a company or to possibly start his own business.  The bottom line is that unless a person is seeking an upwardly mobile career within a corporation, a person can succeed at many levels without a bachelors degree.  It is most important that one becomes an expert within his area of work.  And if you’re going to work for an employer, a recognized 3rd-party certification helps to validate expertise (degree, certifications, training class, license, etc) that creates interest and competition for your skills (the real key to raising your earning potential).  The push for bachelors degrees has created a shortage of many technical skills that employers need.  If a person has skills in electronics, electrical, mechanical, or information systems, there are incredible opportunities that can far exceed the potential one may have in management.  These areas require education, but it is the kind that develops a skill set.  Staying current in these fields is the key to long term viability in the job market.

Everyone has expertise in some area that can be taken to the job market effectively when it is backed by strong character traits.  Expertise combined with the willingness to do “whatever it takes plus a little bit more” is what will be the ultimate measure of one’s job security.

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