Inaugural Post

At the behest of a few Marine officers I associate with, and who are contemplating leaving the Corps to seek employment in the civilian sector, I am committing my lessons learned to a blog.  Depending on the suitability, I may merge in lessons learned from my pending retirement and job hunt as posts here, rather than spend the time updating two blogs concurrently.  Either way, this blog is designed to assist the military officer who is about to leave the military after completing honorable service.  In most cases, and certainly for the junior officers who have only held one significant job - the military - it can be a daunting experience.  I hope, through this blog, to aid in reducing the stress, wasted effort, and confusion inherent in the transition from green to gray.

In this first post, I want to lay out ten basic rules that serve as a foundation for the junior officer's job search.  These rules are not necessarily original thought, and may be an amalgam of different, but related concepts that I have read either during my first transition period, or the intervening years when I have helped young officers and they prepared to leave the military.  I left the Marines ten years ago and had a short break in service, and some of these rules are hard-learned lessons when I was in the hunt for a job myself.

I will go into further detail about each of these rules in subsequent posts.  If you find the material here relevant and helpful, please comment.  If you take issue with the content and think you have a better way, please comment in that regard as well.  Collectively, this blog can serve as a resource for everyone.

And here we go:

#1 Do not undervalue, and in turn, undersell yourself.  Remember those forms that show up yearly and describe the total value of your base pay, special allowances, and various privileges like medical coverage and cheap life insurance?  They are pretty  much on the money, so don't think of your earning potential solely by using your base pay as the frame of reference.

#2 Decide why you are getting out in the first place, and make peace with that decision.

#3 Finding a job is a job in itself.  Get organized for the work ahead.  Dedicate a portion of every day to the task, whether it is tweaking your resume, browsing online job listings, or practicing interview responses.  The practice, and the polished product that results, will outshine your competitors who have not dedicated the same amount of effort to their campaign.

#4 The resume and cover letter get you in the door, the interview gets you the job, and the salary negotiation gets you the compensation you deserve.  Have a strategy for each phase of your campaign.  They need to be treated as distinct and separate, yet interwoven, and you need to set the conditions for a transition from one phase to the next, have branch plans, and be ready for if a sequel takes you down a totally different path than you thought possible.

#5 Dispense with thinking that your accomplishments in the military are understood or sought after in quite the same way as the civilian sector.  As officers, we measure our accomplishments in ways that emphasis creativity, confidence and calm under pressure, command presence, and a variety of other qualities.  Unfortunately, we often tend to frame our billet accomplishments in terms of doing our job the way it was supposed to be done, but the rest of the business world does not.  While these accomplishments are notable and make us desirable to future employers to some degree, employers do not measure these traits on anywhere near the same scale that we might within the military.  As long as we recognize these facts, we can actually harness the knowledge to our benefit.

#6 Invest in a good reference to assist you in the quest for a job.  Read it from front to back, then read it gain until it sinks in.  "Knock 'Em Dead 2010: The Ultimate Job Search Guide" is the best reference I found over ten years ago, and it remains, dollar for dollar, the best tool out there.  It covers everything you need to know and do to handle the first phase of your campaign, and even goes further and provides guidance on the interview and salary negotiation phases.

#7 Junior officer headhunters can serve a purpose, but remember that they have a bottom line and their interests might not square with yours.  They need to convince you why you should let them manage your career and use you to put food on their dinner table.  It all goes back to rule #1.  Make them earn their commission.

#8 Your job search will likely be a lengthy process, and although you should start your campaign approximately one year out, you will be hitting your strides at the six and three month mark.  Organize your leave to support that.  As best you can, organize your billet responsibilities to support each phase as well.  You cannot wait until you are on terminal leave before you start taking care of yourself.  You may need to end your service, move to the area where you want to work, and resume the hunt from there.  

#9 If it looks like sales and smells like sales, it's probably sales.  Recognize your dream job for what it is (perhaps hard to obtain), but also realize that there may be fields you had not considered before that fit what you want to do. Network with folks who got out that you know, peers who are getting out along with you, even your school's alumni association.  Networking remains a valuable tool.

#10 Your job search is going to be expensive.  Start saving towards your campaign now, and keep saving.  If you are making mad money in a deployed environment, save as much of it as you can.  You may need to live off of it for some time and being able to live off of savings for six months to a year may make the difference while you are looking for the job that fits what you want to do, and in the area that suits you.