Holly Mosack intended to go into the Army Reserve once she graduated from Northwestern University in 1997. A Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship helped pay Mosack’s way through college, but a three-week stint at the U.S. Army Airborne School between her junior and senior years changed her course.

“While it was only three weeks, that’s just where I fell in love with the Army and the people,” says Mosack, who after her senior year was commissioned as an officer in the Army. “Just being around the soldiers is what I love.”

Fast-forward to 2004. Mosack had just concluded a seven-year military career and was in the process of what many veterans describe as the daunting transition into the civilian labor force.

“That transition was very difficult. My life was the military. The people I knew were the military,” Mosack says. “While I knew I had some credentials – I went to Northwestern, a great school – I didn’t have the confidence. What can I do in this civilian world? I got this degree in journalism several years ago. I don’t think I want to go into that. What am I going to do?”

Many veterans ask that very same question upon entering the civilian world. The Labor Department on Wednesday estimated 21.2 million veterans were living in the U.S. at the end of 2014, making up about 9 percent of the civilian noninstitutional population – those who are not on active military duty or in mental health facilities or jails – at least 18 years of age.



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And while the military has some programs in place to help with reacclimation, the career counselors and guidance afforded to the average college student as they shape the rest of their lives far exceeds the help many veterans of the same age receive, especially if their military skill sets don’t translate well into the civilian labor force. Many veterans need to fend for themselves to get a job while adjusting to life back home.

“They do have a transition process. Every service member goes through this – how to write a resume and whatnot,” says Mosack, who is now a director of employee communications at Advanced Technology Services, a company that specializes in improving workplace productivity, particularly in the manufacturing sector.

“But you’re so used to, when you’re in the military, those processes. When you go to the doctor, you don’t have a copay. You don’t have to do anything,” she says. “You’re kind of catered to, and when it comes time to find a job, people are expecting that same help, and it’s not there. And I think that sends a lot of veterans into a world of panic once they’re getting out.”

The unemployment rate for veterans at the end of 2014 stood at 5.3 percent, down from 6.6 percent the prior year and lower than the year's national unemployment rate of 6.2 percent. But a further breakdown of this number shows that among veterans who have served since September 2001, 7.2 percent are unemployed – down from 9 percent in 2013.

Total veteran unemployment is consistently lower than the national average, but veterans who have served since September 2001 are having the hardest time finding work. Andrew Soergel for USN&WR; Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Young veterans seem to have the hardest time landing a job immediately after their return from service, as about 16.2 percent of veterans in the labor force between 18 and 24 years old are jobless. But the figures can be misleading.

“The number of veterans within that age group is, as a percentage, significantly lower, and the reason for that is most people join the military at age 18,” says Andrew Schwartz, program manager at Virginia Values Veterans, a program through the Virginia Department of Veterans Services that helps connect employers to veterans looking for work. “Most people get out of the military, if they get out after their first term, at age 22. All of a sudden, your veteran population isn’t 18 to 24. It’s 22 to 24.”

Schwartz says the small sample size in this particular group of veterans inherently creates volatility and statistical unreliability in unemployment figures.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics can never really truly give you a good percentage of unemployment – whether it’s high, whether it’s low – because you have some holes in how that’s captured,” says Steve Gonzalez, an assistant director of the Veterans Employment and Education Division at the American Legion, noting that the figure also doesn’t count some reservists and could include veterans in school who are collecting unemployment. “You have to take it somewhat with a grain of salt, but it’s better to have something that you can kind of work off of with the hopes that you’re still doing the right things to make positive impacts than to have nothing at all.”

Gonzalez says the military offers extensive training for certain high-skills roles like electrical engineering, but that the terminology and processes used in the military aren’t always a “one-to-one direct correlation” to what would be common in a comparable civilian role.

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He cites several programs throughout a host of military bases that offer skills training and certification, allowing military resumes to more seamlessly transition into a civilian context. He mentions Microsoft Corp.’s Microsoft Software & Systems Academy, which offers a 16-week training program to active-duty transitioning service members on at least three major military bases in Washington state, California and Texas.

Gonzalez also references the United Association's Veterans in Piping construction industry apprenticeship program, which offers skills training to service members that, upon completion, can lead to a license applicable in the civilian labor market.

That’s not to say that skills gained through active duty carry over 100 percent of the time.

"What they have learned and what they have brought with them out of the military sometimes is not widely accepted," Gonzalez says. "So you have to go back and get re-educated or retrained into skill sets that you already have acquired.”

Master Sgt. Joshua Ashton, a firefighter in the Air Force who will retire from active duty in October, says the 21 years of firefighting training and experience he'll have once he leaves the military weren’t enough to land him a particular job he sought in the District of Columbia area.

"Sad thing is, during my entire career all I've ever heard from civilians and military members alike is how well qualified/certified we are, and how easy it will be to get our foot in the door when we transition to civilian life," Ashton tells U.S. News in an email. "That's truly just not the case."

He was told he would need a basic Virginia certification to qualify for the position, despite the fact that he already possessed the military-equivalent licensing and multiple advanced certificates. That meant he would have to again show he had mastered basic skills to be realistically considered for the job, essentially nullifying his extensive military training.

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“It’s kind of silly that I would have to do it a second time, either out of my own pocket or at the taxpayers’ expense,” Ashton says. “Everybody pays their federal taxes. Their federal tax dollars go into paying for us to get our training. That should count for something.”

And there's less support in place for veterans who didn’t occupy high-skills positions while in the service, especially if they want to pursue a field outside of policing or security, says Alex Horton, who works at a veteran-focused nonprofit and teaches a digital journalism class at Georgetown University.

“I was an enlisted infantryman, which means I did not have a direct transferable skill or expertise. My job was to maneuver on and kill the enemy. That is not a civilian skill set that is easily marketable or understood,” Horton says. “There’s a faulty assumption at the foundation of it, which is I want to do the same thing I was doing.”

Horton retired from service in late 2007, a few months after his 22nd birthday. He describes the career resources made available to him as “very surface-level” and notes that there’s “just a paucity of information resources available.”

“They don’t tailor any information to you and figure out what you like to do. If someone asked me what I want to do, by looking at my resume and what I did, they would say, 'Go be a cop,'” he says. “Wait a minute: I like writing and I like journalism and I like foreign affairs and I like film. I like writing about stuff. How do I turn that into something? And the current situation, it seems like, and the one I went through is, you don’t. Or you just figure it out.”

Horton bounced from a telemarketing firm to community college to a warehouse filling vans before gathering shopping carts at a Costco part time. But he continued writing and was eventually picked up to start a blog for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Horton says his post-military success is due in part to “someone taking a risk on me, which is, frankly, what I needed. Because I didn’t have any other way to prove myself.”

“That’s where I would really encourage people to understand [veterans are] going through a transition. They have to figure out what they’re going to do. They may have a little job-hopping that first year because they took the first job they could find,” Mosack says. “It’s just a matter of finding the right job for them and giving them that chance.”

Horton says he grappled with underemployment and worked his way toward a college degree “because that’s the social expectation and that’s how you get ahead.” He says it doesn't make sense to hire veterans just because of their service if they're not adequately trained for civilian positions, using a military medic as an example.

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“Yes, combat medics are trained in licensed techniques, but do they use the same equipment of paramedics? Do they use the same techniques and procedures? What are the different kinds of things like liability laws for doing certain things at certain times?” he says. “When you think about it that way, it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous for anyone to say they should just walk in on Day One and be prepared. No, they shouldn’t. I don’t want someone who was stuffing dirt into a gunshot wound in Afghanistan to patch me up after I got hit by a car. I just don’t want it. I want them to be trained in the way other paramedics are trained.”

Horton says surface-level handouts from nonmilitary citizens can create “a transactional relationship where, if we give veterans something, that’s all we have to do and the debt is repaid – if you were to agree there is a debt in the first place.”

“We have really cheesy Budweiser commercials and we put stickers on cars and we say, ‘Aren’t they heroes?’ and let them on airplanes first,’ Horton says. “There’s this overcorrection from Vietnam, which was, ‘Oh, they got treated so poorly and got such a raw deal that we will give them stuff and show our appreciation on such a minuscule level that it’s going to be OK.’”

Instead, he argues that veterans should have the opportunity to prove themselves and be provided more career and transitional guidance upon their return to the civilian world.