Cultural Divide, Smaller Budgets Contribute to Vet Unemployment

Even before they put on a uniform, the members of the post-9/11 generation of servicemembers were the best educated, most tech-savvy ever to sign up. And by the time they leave active duty, they've added to their knowledge base with still more technical and leadership skills.

So why, in a country where business is always fighting for competitive advantage, is overall unemployment among veterans greater than 12 percent – some 3 percentage points higher than their civilian peers?

"It doesn't make sense," said Tom Tarantino, senior legislative associate on Capitol Hill for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "It doesn't follow the rhetoric and practical logic."

According to Tarantino and others who spoke with Military.com, there's no single reason unemployment among veterans is higher than civilians. Instead, there are several contributing factors:  Employers and veterans who fail to see how they can connect; shrinking public sector budgets; and a long-suspected but difficult-to-prove reluctance by some employers to hire workers who may still have a reserve commitment.

Tarantino said he thinks the communication problem comes in part from a lack of civilian understanding.

"We're 30 or 35 years into the all-volunteer force," he said. "There are very few business leaders who served … We now live in a country where so few people understand military service."

At one time, Tarantino said, there was a very good chance that a veteran going in for a job interview would be talking with someone who also was a veteran. There was no need to have to translate what a Soldier might have done and learned in the military because the person on the other side of the desk had been there and done that, Tarantino said.

Other vets' advocates agreed.

Ryan Gallucci, deputy legislative director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars; and Kevin Schmiegel, a vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and founder of its "Hiring Our Heroes" initiative, also cited the communications breakdown.

"It keeps coming back to the transferability of military job experience to the civilian sector," Gallucci said. "If you've got two candidates [one of them a veteran], many times the employer will go with the civilian who spent the last three years in the industry as opposed to being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan," he said -- even if the vet's experience and skills qualify him for the job.

Which mean lowering vets' unemployment will require education for civilians as well as former servicemembers, Schmiegel said:  "We need to educate HR managers on the value of hiring veterans."

In parts of the country without significant populations of veterans, hiring managers often just don't understand what skills a veteran possesses, he said. One of the Chamber's goals is to help employers get that understanding, through efforts with the Labor Department and the National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve.

But veterans have to do their part in selling themselves, too, Schmiegal said. And they need to do it without military jargon, acronyms, and references to skills designations.

"They need to speak more about their leadership experience, they need to talk about their leadership skills, their problem-solving skills, their adaptability, and the fact that they're good team players," he said. "That will distinguish them from a lot of their peers" who did not serve.

But beyond communications and cultural gaps between the military and civilian worlds, there's another obvious but important contributor to vet unemployment: the economy.

While the financial industry has mostly recovered from the 2008 economic crisis, much of the rest of the country has not, which has especially hurt public sector employment. Gallucci cited numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that show veterans traditionally are more likely to work in the public sector – particularly as police officers and firefighters.

"With the budget crisis, it stands to reason veterans are hit hard by the hiring freeze" in these areas, he said.

There are also issues of mobility. Many veterans are married, have families, and perhaps a mortgage when they get out -- not an easy position from which to pull up stakes and move for a job. A RAND Corp. study this year found that servicemembers tend to marry at higher rates than civilians, possibly in part because of the additional benefits the services extend to married troops.

And there's another possible reason that employers could shy away from hiring veterans, though it's difficult to determine beyond anecdotal evidence how widespread a problem it is: Bosses may not want to bring on a new worker who could still have some commitments in the reserves.

"They're not allowed to discriminate," Gallucci said, but he also allowed that some employers might.