Veterans bring a bevy of skill sets to the workplace, but they can also struggle to assimilate into corporate environments. What are your thoughts on recruiting veterans into your workplace?

By Brian P. Watson


Since my abrupt departure as Editor in Chief of CIO Insight, many IT leaders have reached out to see what I’m up to. Well, if you’re reading this site, then you probably know the answer.

But besides building Workforce News, I’ve been busy in my first-ever teaching endeavor. About a month ago, Workforce Opportunity Services convened its first program aimed at training veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan war eras for careers in IT. My job in that program is to help them further develop their writing and speaking skills, in addition to introducing them to corporate IT cultures and workplace environments.

For their first writing assignments, I asked the veterans two key questions:

1. What do you think are the best/most important skills you learned in your military service?
2. What specific concerns do you have about entering the civilian workforce?

Their answers were quite telling—yet somewhat varied—about the challenges veterans face in transitioning from the military to the civilian sector.

The consensus responses meshed pretty well with what hiring executives expect from veterans in the corporate workplace, based on the results of this study from the Society for Human Resource Management.

A few findings surprised me:

- According to the study, only half of the companies responding said they’ve made specific efforts to bring veterans on board.
- In listing the benefits veterans can offer a company, “strategic planning/foresight” ranked 13^th out of 16 choices.
- Almost half of the respondents said they expected veterans to face difficulties in adapting to the corporate hierarchy.

If you’re looking to hire veterans, you should definitely look at this in-depth study.

Growing up, I often heard my basketball coaches say, “You can’t teach height”—meaning, you can’t train someone to play under the basket if they’re vertically challenged. When thinking about hiring veterans, don’t short-change the unique skills they learned in their service. Granted, practically no corporate job requires prowess in handling a machine gun, driving a tank, or, more broadly, surviving in an extremely hostile territory. But veterans know more about adaptability, flexibility and discipline than any undergraduate or business-school program can instill in a student.

Still, this is new territory for me, and I’m very interested to hear from hiring executives about their thoughts on recruiting and hiring veterans. What are your biggest concerns? What skills do you expect them to bring?

Please chime in in the Comments section below.

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