Workshop helps vets in civilian life

November 21, 2011 by Jan Rachel Sicam 

Bootstraps to Briefcases aims to assist servicemembers in marketing talents to business

Rebel VETS sponsored a resume writing and career workshop on Tuesday to help student veterans adapt to civilian life.

Hosted by the Office of Veteran Services, Bootstraps to Briefcases was designed as a program to help veterans translate military careers into accomplished civilian resumes.

The workshop featured career coaches from the Professional Association of Resume Writers and Career Coaches and highlighted effective methods for finding entry-level jobs that student veterans could practice themselves.

“Translating military careers to civilian careers is one of the things the veteran population really has challenges with,” said Rebel VETS Program Coordinator Sally Caspers. “The veteran experience is a specific market and the program understands how useful it is for students.”

Caspers said that a main problem for student veterans is bridging the gap between the military and the civilian world.

“We don’t understand each other well, and so we don’t share a language,” she said. “All we have to do is translate and find a common language so that it’s very easy to see that veterans have highly marketable skills.”

Caspers added that one of the primary benefits of military work is the diversity of experience acquired in a short amount of time.

Because veterans perform multiple duties throughout an assigned amount of time, Caspers said that the number of tasks learned can only add up, eventually creating long lists of experiences regarding constructing a resume.

UNLV student veteran Stewart Foster said that acclimating to the civilian world has been difficult with regards to finding a job that correlates with his past work involving infantry.

With plans to earn a degree in business and finance, Foster said that translating his military background into a civilian resume was a challenge.
“Becoming a business major would provide a lot of job opportunities,” he said. “It seems like a logical opportunity to eventually live comfortably.”

He added that he planned to utilize the information learned from the workshop by deleting combat-oriented terminology involving his work in Afghanistan from his current resume, and translating them into words that blend into civilian-oriented careers.

“There’s a lot of stuff I’ve learned from Afghanistan that I don’t use, but things learned as a veteran, like leadership, taking initiative and getting things done carries on,” Foster said. “I now have an idea what my resume will look like and how to do it, while some guys might not even know where to start translating their experience.”

UNLV student and President of the Student Veterans Organization Joe Sorge served in the Air Force for five years and said that transitioning to work as a civilian may serve as a hindrance due to the proactive mindset he developed while working in the military.

However, he stated that he has learned to adjust to a non-veteran work ethic and said he hopes to establish a career working for the federal government after graduating in spring 2012.

“For the civilian world, everything is completely different,” he said. “I have found that if I really learn to empathize with people and really listen to what they want, I can still take my abilities and still help accomplish the goals of others.”

Although he has been through several training courses that taught him how to build a resume, he credits Bootstraps to Briefcases as a program where he actually learned something useful.

“This is the first program I’ve attended where they really geared it towards the military side and what job I held,” Sorge said. “I actually feel a lot more confident in my abilities now to update my resume and make it talk in civilian language so that I can possibly land the job of my dreams.”

Contact Jan Rachel Sicam at janrachel.sicam.ry@gmail.com