TAOnline Transition Insight Newsletter

Does Your Cover Letter Look Like This?

By Barbara Adams, CPRW, CEIP, CMRC, CFRW www.militaryresumewriters.com and www.careerproplus.com

Career professionals offer so many different opinions regarding whether cover letters should be sent with your resume. Well, most resumes are emailed today and I highly recommend you enter your cover letter in the body of the email or as an attachment when applying for a job.

Your cover letter should address what position you are applying for and provide information directly...
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Vets' transition to civilian jobs often includes a perceived step down

By Megan McCloskey
Used with permission from Stars and Stripes. © 2012 Stars and Stripes.

WASHINGTON — From the lofty responsibilities of war to the bottom rung of the career ladder: That’s the reality that veterans often face when entering the civilian job market.

For Chris Hellie, a former captain in the Army, that meant taking a job managing a deli department at Target.

"Can you imagine the step down that was from leading 180 people...
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Vets' jobless rate takes big drop in February

By Rick Maze

Programs aimed at helping Iraq and Afghanistan veterans find jobs may be paying off, as the federal government reported a dramatic drop in the February unemployment rate for people who separated from the service since 2001.

While the nation's overall unemployment rate remained static at 8.3 percent, the jobless rate for Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans fell in February to 7.6 percent, down from 9.1 percent in January and 12.5 percent...
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Service Connected Disability

Part 1: Purpose & Intent

By Josh Penner, Veterans Advocate

This article is going to be the first of a multiple part series covering all aspects of Service Connected Disability, from premise to appeals - I'll cover a new part of this topic each month. Today, I'm going to cover the purpose and intent of a VA Service Connected Disability.

For many Veterans a Service Connected Disability is the nexus of their experiences with the VA. It is a life changing designation and...
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Food Service Management Positions - FL
Field Service Manager - TX
Fraud Prevention Inspector (1099 Contractor) - Nationwide
Mobile Marketing Sales - GA

Click here for a complete list and description of organizations of TAOnline.com growing Partners!

Seven (7) Texas colleges are offering a unique program where your Military Training and Expertise may be transferred into College Credits. The colleges will provide models for awarding college credit by evaluating military training, including testing and prior learning assessments which other Texas colleges may replicate. There will be a focus on allied health careers, and the initiative will partner with the Military Education Training Center (METC) in San Antonio to provide current active duty service members with an accelerated degree plan. To learn more and determine eligibility, contact the Texas Workforce Commission at (512) 463-8942

Does Your Cover Letter Look Like This?

By Barbara Adams, CPRW, CEIP, CMRC, CFRW
www.militaryresumewriters.com and www.careerproplus.com

Your cover letter should address what position you are applying for and provide information directly in support of what experience the position is requiring. Additionally, you "must" convey why you are the person for the job by combining your experience in clear accomplishment oriented statements that will highlight your success.

Does your cover letter look like this sample? If not, you might want to rethink how your first impression convey's why an employer should hire you.

Download a copy of this sample cover letter.

Barbara Adams, President and CEO of CareerPro Global (CPG), the parent company of www.careerproplus.com and www.militaryresumewriters.com, has been a member of the careers community for the past 20 years. Ms. Adams holds four prestigious industry certifications. CareerPro Global is the only ISO 9001-2008 Certified Career Service in the industry, as well as one of the fastest-growing Military, Federal, and Civilian Resume-Writing and Careers-Coaching companies. The team of Certified Professional Federal and Military Resume Writers at CPG assist thousands of clients in applying for and gaining employment each year. We can help you land your military to civilian job.

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Vets' transition to civilian jobs often includes a perceived step down

By Megan McCloskey
Used with permission from Stars and Stripes. © 2012 Stars and Stripes.

WASHINGTON — From the lofty responsibilities of war to the bottom rung of the career ladder: That's the reality that veterans often face when entering the civilian job market.

For Chris Hellie, a former captain in the Army, that meant taking a job managing a deli department at Target.

"Can you imagine the step down that was from leading 180 people in combat?" he said. "It's definitely a blow to one's pride."

Civilian employers, particularly in today's treacherous job market, typically offer veterans positions that fall short of the level of responsibility they had in the military.

"The reality is people in the military do things their civilian peers won't do until their 30s or 40s," said Tom Tarantino, legislative director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "They hold management positions at 25 years old that someone in the civilian world has to work 15 years to get to."

But veterans don't get to cut in the corporate line, and they struggle with their new place in the food chain.

Some view it as an insult to be asked to start at the bottom, according to Nathan Smith, a former Marine Corps captain and executive director of the nonprofit Hire Heroes, which helps veterans find employment.

"They're pumped up so much in the military because of the wars [that] they leave the military with a sense of entitlement," Smith said.

Michelle Saunders, a director at Hire Heroes, said, "They think, 'I served my country. I deserve an $80,000-a-year job,'"

One of the toughest challenges with officers and senior enlisted is that they're used to being big fish and define themselves by their rank, she said.

Both they and younger vets "feel like they're being demoted," said Patty Sauka, a career coach with VA for Vets.

She's found that about half of the veterans she counsels are willing to take whatever job they can to get their foot in the door, and the other half refuse to take anything less than the level of position they had in the military.

It's a hard road for the latter, she said.

"If you think you're going to slide into the same kind of position, you're going to be heartbroken," said John Wright, a retired sergeant first class who has been looking for a job in logistics for a year.

In his search, the 40-year-old has found that an MBA is required to qualify for positions in the civilian world that equal the level of responsibility of the job he held in the Army.

But having an education doesn't necessarily close the gap with peers.

Army Reserve Spc. Greg Baker graduated from college at an older age because of a two-year break for a deployment to Iraq in 2008. And instead of doing internships in the summer — the kind that often end for his peers with job offers — he was doing Army advanced training courses and deploying to Africa and Haiti.

All that experience gave him strong leadership skills and the ability to handle himself under pressure, but employers "look at you and only see that you don't have any experience in an office," he said.

Tarantino said corporate employers often don’t fully register what a military resume means.

He recalled one interview he did after leaving the Army, where he told a potential employer about his experience as acting company commander for six months in charge of more than 150 soldiers.

"And then the next thing out of [the interviewer's] mouth is 'In this job you would manage 30 people. Can you handle that level of responsibility?'" Tarantino said. "They have no cultural connection to what military service means."

At the same time, veterans "need to understand...you're new to the corporate world," said Lt. Col. Kathryn Poynton, a military liaison at the Chamber of Commerce.

Employers at the Department of Veterans Affairs job fair in Washington last January said that management skills need to be paired with business acumen, learned from time on the job.

Veterans would do best to lose the chip on their shoulder and realize they are taking a step back to move forward, Dave Wallace, military relations manager for Lockheed Martin, said.

"You have to understand the business side, which is totally different from the military," he said, adding that companies are eager for the work ethic of veterans and will hire them if they can accept that it's a transition.

Smith said that means relinquishing an identity that is most important to you.

Servicemembers are used to proudly wearing their valor on their chest and having that distinguish them. Yet medals hold no value in the civilian world.

You can't use "courage" as a bullet point on a resume, Smith said.

"It's not a selling point."

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Vets' jobless rate takes big drop in February

By Rick Maze

The drop is so fast and so dramatic that it could be a statistical anomaly because veterans make up such a small part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly employment survey.

One reason to suspect a statistical blip is that the unemployment rate for female veterans separated from the service since 2011 has been in the double digits for several months, more than twice the jobless rate for men of the same generation. In the February report, the jobless rate for recent female veterans fell from 17.3 percent in January to 7.4 percent in February, putting the women’s rate slightly below the rate for men.

For veterans of all generations, the February unemployment rate was 7 percent, down from 7.5 percent in January.

Federal, state and local governments, and private industry have undertaken broad efforts to help separating service members find jobs, and more ideas appear every day.

Last week, Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., an Air Force veteran who served during the 1991 Gulf War, introduced a bill aimed at using federal authority over licensing to help more veterans get jobs. His Veterans Skills to Jobs Act, HR 4155, would require federal agencies to treat relevant military training as the equivalent of federal licensing and certification requirement, which he believes would put more veterans to work faster.

Denham's bill would help in fields that require federally issued occupational licenses, including aerospace, communications and maritime jobs.

In a statement, Denham said the federal government "should be an example to the states that are looking for ways to improve veteran transitions."

"America is blessed with the strongest, most capable and professional military in the world," he said. "Unfortunately, even though many of our veterans have the training to perform a wide variety of occupations, the private sector and even other departments of the federal government do not recognize this training."

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Service Connected Disability

Part 1: Purpose & Intent

By Josh Penner, Veterans Advocate

For many Veterans a Service Connected Disability is the nexus of their experiences with the VA. It is a life changing designation and because of this it often seems the process of obtaining it is life changing as well - perhaps not always for the better. In fact, it can be an incredibly stressful and discouraging process and it is not uncommon for an initial claim to take upwards of a year or more before a decision is made and a subsequent appeal to any part of or the entirety of the VA's decision may easily take two or more additional years.

There are many articles describing how one might go about fixing an appeal to a bad decision, or even in some cases speed it up (we'll discuss this in a later post), but we're going to look at the situation a little different for March. I would like to make sure that everyone reading this text understands going into a VA SCD claim, what their intention was and whether it held merit - for the purposes of the benefit.

So - what is a service connected disability? The title itself is a little misleading perhaps. It invokes that one must have a severely limiting condition in order to qualify. In point of fact, a service connected disability may be something that even a doctor might not see initially. A service connected disability is compensation paid to the Veteran for injuries and/or diseases that may have occurred or been made worse while on active duty or by active military service. In some cases - the Service Connected Disability also pertains to injuries received by the Veteran due to VA medical care.

Key points to remember:

The presumption is that you went in to the military at 100% or near to it. If you came out less, regardless of cause (other than general entropy due to aging), you probably do have a claim for Service Connected Disability.
The burden of evidence required is that the injury or illness was more likely than not (50% or greater) caused or aggravated by or due to military service.

And a couple of key points to understand:

A VA Service Connected Disability - with the exception of Total Disability Individual Unemployability (TDIU) has nothing to do with your ability to work and make a living. It is completely different than Social Security - in that it is a compensation for loss of function, rather than a compensation for inability to work. You can work and collect a Service Connected Disability (except TDIU).
The ONLY discharge status that will stop you from being able to claim a Service Connected Disability is a Dishonorable Discharge. It is a common myth that an Honorable Discharge is required for this benefit. Though, you may not be able to collect financial remuneration with an Other than Honorable or Bad Conduct Discharge - you will always receive health care relating to the disability upon award of this benefit.

Hopefully - this clears things up a little and brings us all to the same page so that next month we can cover more about eligibility and the process of filing a Service Connected Disability Claim.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, send me an email: Josh@VetsCVC.com

Josh Penner, Veterans Advocate:
Owner, Core Values Consulting - www.vetsCVC.com
Josh served in the United States Marine Corps as a Radio Operator from 2004-2011. He is a Veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and uses his experiences as well as his business education to advocate for and assist Veterans in connecting to resources and benefits. In addition to providing direct services to Veterans, Josh is a regular speaker on Veterans Benefits topics, and regularly consults with businesses and organizations wishing to gain insight in to the broad spectrum of Veterans Benefits and Resources from the Federal, State, County, and Local levels

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