Hard for whom?

If I have one more person expect me to pity them because their husband can't find a job on the outside, I'm seriously going to scream. "Jobs are hard to come by!" This is the general consensus, but for WHOM are they so hard to come by? For Thak, it took him not quite 48 hours to find a job. We had anticipated this horribly long and drawn out job search. We'd printed up enough resumes and cover letters for every business in West Texas that remotely pertained to his field. We'd even checked into what companies might be hiring mechanics to work in the oil fields 4 hours away. We were scared to death of what we were going to find when he started taking those resumes around. We started taking resumes around to the most preferable employers on New Year's Eve, and on January 2, he got two offers, and chose the most preferable of them. Tough crowd.

Now, I will say, Thak's job is hard. It doesn't pay what the military paid. The benefits aren't what they are for an Active Duty soldier either. Not to mention the hours are longer, and yes, he can be fired if that's what they choose to do. These are just the reality of the private sector, and we knew it going in. It's not some terrible thing. It just is what it is.

This brings me to one of my observations about military people. They want everything handed to them, and they want it to be as easy as it is in the military. I've been told, "Well, MY husband is a combat veteran and can't find a job!" so many times, and my response is always the same. "My husband is a combat veteran, and works on the shop floor at BMW. What has your husband done to make himself marketable to civilian employers? Just being a veteran is not enough." They've never done anything, of course. They just expect that their military skills will translate one for one, and they'll get some super high paying civilian job the minute they leave post. That's not how it works, though. You have to make your military skills make sense to the civilian employers. You need civilian licensing. You may need a degree, depending on your field. More than anything, you need to be realistic about this stuff.

I definitely think that employers should support the military and veterans. I think it's awesome that Thak's employer is so military-friendly. They hire veterans like nobody's business. However, the veterans they're hiring have taken the time to translate their skills into civilian equivalents, and made themselves marketable. They haven't just walked in with a crapped up resume full of military lingo, and said "I'm a veteran. Hire me." That would never work. Veterans who want to succeed, and take the steps to make themselves marketable, generally do succeed. Sure, there are exceptions, but in the vast majority of cases, this holds true.

I think military personnel, veterans, and ESPECIALLY family members, do themselves a great disservice by acting as if there is some great injustice at play in current hiring practices, just because veterans can't just walk into any place and walk out with a job. That's NEVER been the case, just so you know. Veteran status has never been enough. To act as if it should be is only to shoot oneself in the foot when it comes time to get out there. Sure, maybe your or your husband's job search won't be over in 48 hours like Thak's was, but from what I have seen, most veterans who have used their time and resources wisely CAN find a job within a reasonable amount of time.

This is the primary difference between the military and the private sector. In the military, there's always someone or some system to blame when things don't go your way. Out here, we have only ourselves. That's something that doesn't seem to sit well with a lot of military people. They want to blame somebody that isn't them, because if they're the one who created the situation, then they're the one who'll have to clean it up, and it'll be just that much more apparent that they're no longer working within Uncle Sam's framework of 10,000 safety nets. All in all, though, I don't think it's so bad out here. It's harder than the military, yes, but not in a bad way.