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Mission: Transition
Soon to be unmasked for the civilian world to see …
Three and a half decades after I first took the oath that has defined my professional life thus far, I am facing a very different kind of mission: military retirement and transition to civilian status. It is hardly my first big project, and a great many fine colleagues have gone before me and testify that, with careful planning and preparation, it may be done quite successfully. Yet the prospect seems strangely daunting. Why?
I suppose that in some part it is because, for the first time since I was 19 years old, the choice of what to do next is entirely my own (with all appropriate acknowledgments to my amazingly supportive wife of 30 years, who definitely gets a vote). Nor have I been without choices throughout my military career, but in the end, the “needs of the service” were ever paramount.
One might say I have until now chosen off the career menu, and even then the cook always had the last word on what I would eat.
This has led to an extraordinarily broad and interesting collection of life experiences, and like most military officers I’ve learned to be very adaptable by necessity. I have worked in a variety of fields, including operations, intelligence, communications, and diplomacy. I have led people, programs, projects, and enterprises. I have served in a dozen different countries and two combat zones. I read, write, and speak passable Vietnamese (long story).
Yet when asked to name my value proposition for a civilian employer, I … um … change the subject. You see, “Jack of all trades” is not actually a marketable skill.
I don’t think my fundamental challenge is one of self-awareness. All these life experiences have given me a pretty good sense of what I do well and–just as importantly–where I’m weak. For example, I’m better at context than details; I’m a natural introvert who loves to teach and is comfortable in leadership, but can be awkward in large gatherings; I’m more intuitive than analytical; in negotiations, I’m usually the stabilizer who seeks consensus; I’m effective at crafting an argument, though I’m also an idealist who really needs to believe in the product I’m selling.
As I said, I have a pretty good idea of who I am at my core.
Rather, my current struggle is to envision a role for which my strengths and experiences translate into a job that I am both excited to do and confident will return value to an employer. Once I can get my brain around what that happy, productive, effective, civilian version of myself looks like, I’m confident I can package and sell it.
So that’s where I am today.
So why am I telling you this? Well, writing has always been therapeutic for me, helping me to define and enunciate my thoughts on important matters. At times it has also proved useful to others, which adds a special joy to the process.
Published in Military
Whoever your future employer is will fall in love with your skill stack. My Dad was in your shoe’s back in 76. He was 30 years Air Force. Chief Master Sargent. The job he took was shipping coordinator for a small pharma company. His boss/owner thought he was the cat’s meow. I inherited his qualities. My boss thinks the same of me.
Good luck in your endeavor.
Thank you for your service! I’m not much help with packaging your skills for a job (I’ve been retired for ten years and was an independent consultant for 30 years before then) but we have lots of retired military on this site. If you are interested in their thoughts, be sure to ask.
Thanks for your service! That is a real commitment.
I have noticed that several of the best run local franchise operations are run by ex-military. The local Chik-Fil-A is a good example. It is run very smoothly and the mostly young crew are learning to work as a team from a real leader.
Let us know which way you go.
A challenge I have seen (mostly from the sidelines) for people retiring from the military is learning to market themselves and their skillset. I detect in your post that may be a challenge for you, too. A “career coach” might be able to help you focus your targeting and packaging. Maybe some other recently retired military colleagues have used ones they can recommend.
Au contraire ! A major need for a good general manager is to know enough about everything that is going on around him that he can effectively lead the experts whom he is managing. Why are you a good “jack of all trades”? Apparently you have flexibility, ability to learn quick, ability to integrate information and advice from multiple reporting experts, etc.
The best bosses I have had were those who were not experts in some narrow aspect of the company or the technical field, but could bring information from various people and places together.
I’ve been running workshops for police officers on retirement. I would guess there are some similarities, especially if you’re retiring from very active service, so I’ll name a few of the issues I’ve observed in my guys:
1.) It’s tough to go from a job that has a lot of intrinsic, moral meaning (it matters what you do, and it matters that you do it well) to jobs that are…hmnnn…well, just jobs. You grow accustomed to it and even get to like it. I’ve got a friend—retired Lieutenant—who has come to value the peace and serenity of bush hogging fields, for example.
2.) It is very weird to realize that the institution you were an integral and necessary part of for thirty years is now…going on without you. For cops, it’s hearing the sirens and realizing that no one is going to call them to respond. This, too, can be gotten used to and eventually seen as a good thing. (Wives are generally enthusiastic about this feature of retirement!) Some of my agencies retirees volunteer for our Critical Incident Stress Management team, and they make fantastic peer-support and peer-debriefers. Lots of credibility!
3.) With no (or few) new hits of anesthetic adrenaline to mask them, old traumas can at last begin to make themselves felt. This is natural and normal, and in my lexicon it’s also sacred. That old battle, that old search and rescue operation for a child who didn’t make it, the day a buddy died… honor these moments and even the pain that accompanies the memories with ritual and prayer, take good care of your body (drink water, take a walk, solicit hugs from family members, rest) and have faith that the pain passes but the love endures.
4.) Find something to do that—ideally, anyway—doesn’t keep pounding on the ol’ sore spots. Cops have a tendency to retire into cop-like jobs (e.g. private detective, running security systems, doing courtroom security for the U.S. Marshalls, etc.) possibly because these are familiar and seem like they’d be easy. I don’t know if former military people do the same? My late husband, a state trooper, planned to be a minister after retirement; I met a surprising number of cops at my seminary who’d had the same idea: “I’ll still work on The Problem (evil, pain, suffering of innocents, etc.) but from a completely different angle!”Another trooper I know retired …and became an elementary school gym teacher, teaching fitness to little squirts. He’s really good at it, and it turns out to be a nice dose of Yin to balance thirty years of Yang.
Concur. And I’ve noticed that “Jacks of all trades” are usually “Master of many trades”. The latter is really, really valuable. There are buzz-phrases for that in a number of fields, like a “Full-stack software engineer” is a master of many IT technologies. You might want to survey your skills for combinations that have acquired new names. I’ll bet you have some.
I think it’s a shame that the military doesn’t encourage people to get out of the military and come back again later. I think it’s a tragedy that not a single general or flag officer has ever held a civilian job, except when in high school and perhaps some had summer jobs in college. I think the military would benefit from leaders who have the experience of looking for work and finding a way to add value to a business.
Sadly, my wistful desire to have a more rounded military leadership would only result in the growth of an industry of employing military officers to work in defense jobs and expect to come back to those civilian jobs after lobbying within the military — even more than they already do.
Good luck on your job search. It appears you’re a colonel, and there is always a good market for colonels who have learned to lead and be effective. Being a colonel is no guarantee, because there are plenty of bad colonels out there, but the good ones show and are sought after.
Chik Fil-A franchise? No. Manager within a large industrial facility? Yes.
That’s a very important point. You have to take off the uniform and the attitude and conform to the behavioralisms of your peers, but you can’t lose the professionalism that got you to where you were in the military.
It’s the integrity that is valued so much. There are lots of smart people. There are lots of effective people.
When I worked at Dell, they hired a few retired Marine colonels at high leadership levels. I don’t know if it was their first job or not, but they did not work in the same areas, so they didn’t form a clicque. But they were very effective from my perspective.
Accurate. Project management is good space for this, since the PM should not be doing the actual *work* of the project, he or she has good resources working on the project, orchestrates the work, removes roadblocks, owns the higher-level communications, financials, etc.
I spent 24 years in the Army. I got out when I realized my wife couldn’t take it any more and I realized I was happy to make SGM. I didn’t want to be one. I started out as a MP Dog Handler and worked my way up on the patrol side and the playing in the woods side, company operations and training. When planning my retirement, I saw that there were a bazillion career fields and a bazillion people just like me looking for work. No one cared that I could run two miles in 13 minutes, do an obstacle course, rappel from a copter, write a very good or very bad evaluation. So, my considerations, indoor work, no rotating hours or days, tired of donating my time, and I didn’t want to look for a job. I wanted the job to come look for me. So, health care and back to school. Vietnam era GI bill,full time work as a corrections supervisor and full time school. Ended up happily doing MRI.
I work with a number of ex-senior military men. And there is a REAL culture shock that I have seen time and again. Here are some of my pet peeves:
1: Vets don’t value time the way I do. They are more happy with long commutes, stretched-out tasks, putting in the hours. Invariably they do not prioritize like civilians who work in the private sector. We do not get to beaver away in a silo; we have to manage the bigger picture, too, the stuff above our pay grade.
2: War stories. Telling war stories is not work. Talking is not (usually) work. Reliving old experiences is not work. I do not go through a day when I do not want to shoot a vet for talking instead of doing. Whatever happened to the strong silent type?
2b: Corollary – Assuming the audience is stupid. Points can – and must – be made once and effectively. Repeating the same point from different angles insults my intelligence and capacity to understand. More than that: it wastes time. Enough.
3: The vocabulary does not translate. “Roger,” “Tracking,” “Alcon,” etc do not mean what the speaker thinks they mean. It takes time and work to convert the vocabulary into something usable in the commercial world. And it must be converted: there is a reason for different vocabularies. Do not assume that if the civvies just spoke like vets all would be well.
See I told you so. Civilians couldn’t care less what you did or where you did it. In MRI it’s about through put. That’s upper most in the manager’s mind and better be number one for the tech. If it’s not about production, keep it to yourself. Everyone gets paid for production, not talking to Joe.
I only care about what someone can do in the future.
Roger. Tracking.
Seriously though … I get your perspective. But I can’t help but wonder if this doesn’t tell us as much about your personality as it does about retired officers. That’s not to say there’s not truth in here … I can process the idea that vets are likely to value camaraderie and office banter–and I can totally see war stories as occupying an outsized place in that banter.
Moreover, I fully acknowledge and accept that the primary burden should be on us to adapt to the civilian workplace.
On the other hand, don’t you think you’re taking it a little far?
I mean, annoyance is one thing. Everyone has annoying officemates. This feels more like simmering contempt.
To be fair, a lot of “senior” military officers are accustomed to very preferential treatment and if they aren’t careful, they might expect more respect than is due in civilian circles.
My personal advice is the stay away from civilian jobs where there are a lot of military officers. These have a tendency to continue to wear their rank and then they are clique-ish. You will likely have trouble standing out in such an arrangement because you’ll be in a military pecking order that will be difficult to circumvent. The most successful former military officers in my experience were ones who used their leadership and interpersonal skills outside of a military environment, adapted for the civilian world, but keeping the basic concepts of leadership and management in mind. It’s their personal skill set that sets them apart, which they would have had regardless of being in the military. It’s just sometimes that military background opens the door, gives them some credibility for those looking for it.
So look for being part of upper management teams, which means you need to know a lot about the company at a sophisticated level.
And stay away from military head hunters. They are terrible.
Points well taken, thanks! And despite my initial pushback I take @iwe‘s points as well. He has made me think, which is not a bad thing.
IWe is good at that.
You are right. I am highly driven and focused, and I am not insecure.
I am the boss. I manage all kinds of people, across continents and cultures. I am pretty good at it. I set the culture and I try to motivate people to do what they otherwise would not. Most people can be persuaded to adapt. Ex-military people come with their own culture, and that culture is baked in to such an extent that it becomes an active point of resistance.
No contempt. But some degree of weariness.
I have seen this first hand, where a retired bird colonel totally lost it when he was patronized by a genius millennial engineer. There was a hell of a lot of anger and resentment in that explosion.
Sadly, I have seen it too. I have supervised active duty colonels in a State Department-run environment, and have had to deal with similarly bruised egos on more than one occasion. So … again, point well taken.
I thank God I never will have to work for you or interact with you professionally.
Jailer – if you want a job that involves weaponry and working with people who are also veterans, look into nuclear power plant security, or other high end security work. Not necessarily exciting work though.
Yes. And of course!
Good point!
I was once asked by a Scandinavian trader how I could ever hope to be successful in commerce since I am not much of a vodka-drinker.
I have a number 2 who is much more patient in social settings than I am. He handles the cocktail parties.
You have a passion for the USA – thank you for serving her! Make a list and write what else you are passionate about and take your time – include hobbies (that you always liked but never had time for). The world must seem so different than when you entered service, so it seems you have many skills that are very marketable in this insane environment. My neighbor was called out of military retirement and asked to come to Tyndall to teach combat training virtually. He was (and maybe still is) a private pilot for hire.
This might also be a time to renew your family ties, and that may weigh in your decisions. Keep writing!
Frankly, if I were retiring from 35 years active duty as an O-6, I wouldn’t work again a day in my life. You’ve no need for money, but you may want more money. Life is now easy for you. You can work or not work. You probably already own a home, or can afford one. Retirement pay is over $5k per month before taxes.
If you go to work, you can afford to wait for a good job.
Does it matter what the organization does? If, for example, we were saving the world, would it not be worth putting up with an SOB like me?
I feel a little young to be fully retired. Besides, having just put two kids through college it’s not like I’m bursting with ready cash …
But yes, I can afford to wait for the right job, and that’s a mercy.
I waited to post this — that parking lot looks like #FormerlyUndisclosed.