Invest New Talent in Your Business: Working with Veterans as Employees and Entrepreneurs

The Benefits of Working With Veterans

Veterans represent an untapped opportunity as employees and as entrepreneurial partners, particularly for businesses facing serious hiring challenges or startups looking for innovative partners or managers.

Veterans and Non-Veterans: A Snapshot Comparison

Employment Statistics

• Veterans currently make up around 5.2% of the US workforce, which equates to 8,358,000 people.
• The veteran unemployment rate was 2.8% as of 2023, lower than the 3.6% unemployment rate for nonveterans.
• Veterans are three times more likely to have a graduate degree than nonveterans.
• Veterans are also 27% less likely to leave their first civilian job within six months compared to nonveterans.

Key Occupations

Veterans tend to find employment in the following occupations:

• Business, management, and financial operations – Preferred by 21% of veterans versus 19% of nonveterans.
• Production, transportation, and material moving – Preferred by 17% of veterans versus 12% of nonveterans.
• Installation, maintenance, and repair – Preferred by 7% of veterans versus less than 3% of nonveterans.

A Skilled Section of the Labor Force

As former military personnel, veterans will have spent years cross-training on multiple hard skills, gaining real-world experience, and refining the very soft skills you would look for in a trusted partner, all of which make them a real asset in the workplace.

Some key strengths and values that veterans bring to the workplace usually include:

• Teamwork
• Critical Thinking
• Patience
• Problem-solving
• Adaptability and Resilience
• Respect
• Self-confidence
• Discipline
• Strong Work Ethic and Organizational Commitment

These attributes also make veterans highly entrepreneurial, innovative, and more likely to succeed in business than nonveterans. Multiple studies have found that veterans are twice more likely than nonveterans to start businesses after leaving service, and their five-year success rate is also significantly higher than the national average.

Veterans Come Equipped With Impressive Hard Skills

Beyond a veteran’s spirit and spine, their experience has also armed them with hard skills critical to moving a business forward. Service members possess a whole portfolio of cross-functional skills and can bring extensive training and experience in:

• Technology
• Cyber Security
• Mechanics
• Medicine
• People Management
• Project Management
• Building and Construction
• Design and Engineering
• Creative Skills
• Language Skills and Cross-Cultural Experience

In a labor market where more and more businesses are moving to a skills-first hiring strategy, veterans are increasingly standing out as competitive candidates for skilled roles. In fact, LinkedIn’s Veteran Opportunity Report 2023 found that 61% of veterans were hired for high-skilled roles as their first civilian jobs, a statistic that has been steadily increasing since 2016.

Leveraging Veteran Experience

Analysis by McKinsey found that veterans are highly rated on technical skills such as installation, equipment maintenance, repairs, and troubleshooting, making them well-suited to occupational trades such as electricians, mechanics, and construction professionals.

In particular, McKinsey has named infrastructure and manufacturing as two industries with labor shortages that would greatly benefit from the untapped skills, compatibility, and technical advantage veterans offer.

Veterans are also extremely effective in occupations where failure is a common occurrence, due to the high levels of resilience they develop in their military experience. These include roles in new product development, early-stage ventures, sales, high-technology ventures, and environments involving customer transactions.

Helpful Tips for Recruiting Talented Veterans

Recruiting

The following websites are excellent resources for finding the right talent for your business:

• National Labor Exchange
• Hire a Veteran 
• Military Hire
• Military.com
• Department of Labor
• ACP 
• Military One Source 

Reading a Veteran’s Resume

An ex-service member’s resume or CV can often include military lingo, which can make it difficult for civilian hiring managers to understand their capabilities and qualifications. Here is a guide to help you translate key military skills into professional workplace skills:

• Advanced Individual Training – advanced skills course(s) in their job specialty.
• BLC, PLDC, BNOC, and ANOC – different levels of basic and intermediate leadership and management courses. BLC and PLDC are basic levels, while BNOC is intermediate and ANOC is advanced.
• OAC – entry-level officer training.
• Combined Arms Staff College – senior management leadership school.
• Command and Staff College – senior leadership training.
• War College – executive leadership school.
• TYD/TAD – business travel experience.
• PCS – relocation experience and expertise.
• OER/NCOER – experience with performance appraisals.
• Commanded – directly managed and supervised a group of workers.
• Reconnaissance – data collection, survey, and analysis.
• Combat Experience – evidence of successfully navigating hazardous conditions, conflict, problem-solving, and critical thinking challenges.

Veterans: An Opportunity to Grow Your Business

Military veterans are a gold mine of talent uniquely equipped to thrive in competitive business environments and solve key business challenges.

In a labor market that continues to face labor shortages in the professional and business service sectors, it has become more important than ever for businesses to consider their strategies for hiring talent.

Companies that adapt to a skills-first hiring approach will inevitably attract candidates with unique skills and experiences – and it is often their unconventional background that empowers these candidates to play a critical role in reinvigorating a business.

We think you’ll also like:

1. Veteran-Owned Businesses Make All Kinds of Sense
2. High School Grads Are Skipping College. That’s A Good Thing.
3. Talent Development Strategies for the Talent You Have Today but Need Tomorrow

[Editors’ Note: To learn more about this and related topics, you may want to attend the following on-demand webinars (which you can view at your leisure, and each includes a comprehensive customer PowerPoint about the topic):

1. Welcome to the Team! Recruiting & Hiring, Including Restrictive Covenants
2. The Sales, Marketing, Advertising & Publicity Bootcamp
3. What Every Founder/Entrepreneur Must Know

This is an updated version of an article originally published on November 11, 2022. This article was most recently updated by the Financial Poise Editors.]

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