Are you looking at your post-military job hunt and thinking:
“How am I going to compete with all of these civilians? They’ve been doing this for years, and I’m just getting started!”
The answer is you can’t—at least not if you try to compete using conventional tactics.
But…that doesn’t mean you can’t win this fight.
You just need to change your approach.
Why Conventional Tactics Won’t Work in Your Post-military Employment Search
While veterans have been serving their country, civilians have been climbing the corporate ladder.
Civilians often have:
- More experience in the career field veterans are entering
- Degrees and certifications desired by hiring authorities
- An understanding of the language, culture, and trends in the industry
- A more extensive network of individuals in the companies doing the hiring
- Experience writing resumes and being interviewed
Trying to match your skills against theirs in what the military would call a peer-to-peer or near-peer conventional fight for employment won’t work because they likely have the advantage.
Instead, a less conventional approach can be more effective.
In the Post-military Employment Hunt, You’re David, Not Goliath
As part of the US military, you’re probably used to being part of the more robust, conventional force. You’ve learned to excel in that space. You’ve mastered the tools of your trade. And you are used to applying those principles. In direct competition with other military members, you can quickly determine where you stand. And, because you’re both bringing the same guns to the fight, you can go head-to-head and be pretty sure who will come out on top.
But, when you transition, roles are reversed. Suddenly, you are confronted by a very different battlefield. One with tools of the trade you’ve never learned, different rules of engagement, and competitors who have spent years honing their skills. You find yourself in what is, in essence, an unconventional or asymmetric style of competition.
Asymmetric Warfare: A Definition
As a refresher, asymmetric warfare is:
“unconventional strategies and tactics adopted by a force when the military capabilities of belligerent powers are not simply unequal but are so significantly different that they cannot make the same sorts of attacks on each other”
Ellen Sexton, “Asymmetric Warfare,” britannica.com
As military members, we’ve spent years studying how enemies who don’t have the same weapons systems, air superiority, or technology can still win battles. (Some of us have even been engaged in these types of fights on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.) But now that you’re joining the civilian employment arena, you’re no longer the larger, more conventional force.
Instead, you’ve become the “belligerent power”. Your capabilities are “unequal” and “so significantly different” from your civilian counterparts that trying to take on them on in a head-to-head corporate-employment-skills-competition is likely going to end in disappointment or disaster.
When confronted by this change in status, many veterans feel defeated. I coach many service members who, despite years of building up a breadth and depth of marketable skills, assume they are entry-level material, or that they don’t have any tools to take on this fight, or who are just sheer overwhelmed about where to even start tackling the post-military job-hunting process. Honestly, I even thought the same thing when I transitioned!
What veterans often don’t realize is that we have been trained on precisely this kind of fight! We’ve studied this kind of enemy. If we would just stop looking at post-military employment as a near-peer competition and, instead, start viewing it as an asymmetric fight, we could use what we already know to our advantage.
Asymmetric Examples in the Civilian World
Now, you might be thinking, can you actually apply asymmetric or unconventional warfare principles to finding a job after you leave the service? Absolutely.
Anybody else a Tim Ferris fan? He recently included a link in his 5-Bullet Friday Newsletter to an excerpt from a new book titled How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs.
In it, author Guy Raz, host of NPR’s How I Built This podcast, talks about how companies like RXBar and 5-hour Energy adapted asymmetric principles to launch their businesses. They knew they couldn’t go against the behemoths in their industries in a direct attack, as their competitors’ overwhelming resources would crush them. Instead, they had to employ unconventional means, such as different sales mechanisms or smaller packaging, to break into and secure their place in the market.
This is just one example of how asymmetric warfare principles aren’t just confined to the battlefield. So, how do you apply them to your hunt for post-military employment?
Here Are 5 Ways Transitioning Service Members Can Approach Their Post-military Job Search Asymmetrically.
1. Identify Your Post-military Objective
Whether you’re a conventional force or an unconventional one, all your strategy, tactics, and tools are useless if you can’t clearly identify your objective, or what the Army refers to as your “desired end state”.
If there is one part of the transition process that service members usually rush through, it’s this one.
This may be because we don’t leave ourselves enough time to think through it before we need a paycheck. Or maybe because we are so used to meeting “the needs of the military” that we have forgotten how to ask for what we want. Or maybe because we assume we aren’t qualified for what we really want.
Whatever the reason veterans fail to define their objective, it severely inhibits a successful transition. In fact, none of the other steps we will talk about can be done effectively unless a clear end state is defined.
If you aren’t sure how to determine your desired end state, check out my article in ClearanceJobs on How to Apply the Military Decisionmaking Methodology to Your Transition.
2. Study the Employers’ Battlespace
In this 2017 TEDTalk, Jason Shen, a 3-time start-up founder, describes how he managed to land a tech job at Etsy. With two biology degrees and no tech experience, Shen wasn’t the ideal candidate. But, he persevered by thoroughly studying the company’s public information and developing a solution that demonstrated why he was the right choice for the job.
As Shen did, veterans can look beyond a company’s job posting to find a “weakness” they can exploit to demonstrate their value to a potential hiring manager. A few places to look include a company’s news and events pages, news articles, and leadership biographies.
I once clinched a job at a university because I compared their degree programs to the Department of Labor’s fastest-growing industry list and asked whether they would be offering additional programs on that list at the new campus they were opening, which I’d read about in one of their press releases. It was clear that other candidates for that job hadn’t put in that much effort and I got the job.
Whether you take it further, as Shen did, or drop a detail into an interview, as I did, doing your homework on the company, organization, or person you want to connect with pays off when it comes to post-military employment success.
Shen also provides this fun fact from a 2010 study: only 25% of college graduates work a job in the same field as their college degree. What does that mean for veterans? It means if 75% of college graduates can get a job in an area they know nothing about, so can you! (Yes, even if you were an infantry grunt.)
Jason shen, 2017 ted talk: “Looking for a job? highlight your ability, not your experience.”
3. Utilize Every Advantage in Your Job Hunt
If a direct assault on your dream job or company isn’t the most effective option, it’s time to employ that out-of-the-box thinking the military taught you. Now that you’ve studied your employers’ “battlespace,” you can use that data to develop a strategy to secure your post-military employment target.
What are some tactics you could use to connect with and impress employers that are outside of the normal employment pipeline and don’t use the typical method of submitting your resume online?
Could you strike up a conversation with their military veteran hiring manager? Attend a company-sponsored event? Find a friend who works there that will refer you? Join a veterans organization that has ties to the company, attend a sponsored event, and then write to the company about how much you appreciated their sponsorship of the event? Write an article or LinkedIn post on a topic that the company is struggling with or an area they are expanding into? Join an industry-specific professional organization? Apply for a company veteran-specific fellowship, internship, or hiring program?
The options are almost endless. And don’t forget to include this next step on this list.
4. Bring Others to Your Post-Military Employment Cause
In asymmetric warfare, one of the fundamental tenets is trying to recruit others to a cause. In a 2008 piece on countering asymmetrical warfare, author David E. Long says:
“No asymmetrical organization or movement can long survive much less achieve its political objectives without a significant outside support system.”
Although this has started to change in the years since I left the service, far too often, military members still assume (and we all know about that word) that they have to tackle transition issues alone. This mentality is one of the most dangerous in how it impacts transition. It’s also the most easily remedied, as service members have one of the country’s largest networks—what I call the Military Alumni Network.
Over 200,000 service members leave the military each year. That means, in just the past five years, over a million people just like you have run the post-military job hunt gauntlet. And, like me, many—in fact, probably most of them—are willing to pass along their lessons learned.
Reach out to your fellow veterans and enlist them in your post-military employment campaign. Use platforms like LinkedIn, Veterati, and Vets2Industry to locate your alumni network. Let them be the bridge between your old life and your new one and allow them to pass on their lessons learned.
5. Be Tenacious
As Sun Tzu observed, no country can survive a protracted campaign. Or, as the author of Brag Better, Meredith Fineman put it on a recent episode of the Unstoppable podcast,
“Two ways to get people to listen: repetition and consistency.”
You may not tackle the giant on the first go-round—just like you probably weren’t a massive success on your first day of basic training. But, just as you survived that Drill Instructor, you can survive this too with a little grit and tenacity.
The military-to-civilian transition is a process, one that requires veterans to learn a new skill set, language, industries, and people. But, at the end of the day, civilian life—and finding a civilian job—is just another problem to solve. And applying your knowledge of asymmetric tactics is only one skillset veterans have that you can employ in developing a solution.
© 2020, Sarah Maples LLC. All rights reserved.
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