When a veteran seeks to transition from the military lifestyle to the civilian workplace the task is anything but easy. Its broken, it doesn't work and no one gets it. The past 48 hours I have been involved in a hackathon competition traveling from New York City, NY to Austin, TX and five of us are looking to solve the veteran unemployment crisis. In one particular stop in Louisiana, we spoke to a man who's brother had such struggles finding employment that he ultimately had to settle for a job well under his skill level and ultimately at a much lower pay than what he should have been.
The unemployment rate for veterans is well over the general population unemployment rate. As the Afghanistan War winds down, more than 300,000 veterans will leave the military each of the next few years. Recent surveys point to servicemembers unable to translate military experience to civilian workplace opportunities. We have to change this.
It's time to take the whole job search process and throw it out the window. Having a veteran type big buzzwords in a search engine box doesn't help and its not personalizing the experience to our men and women in uniform and certainly isn't helping anxiety levels. In these few short hours of this hackathon, we have developed an application called CareerMob that seeks to revolutionize the ways veterans seek employment and receive help transitioning to the civilian workplace.
CareerMob starts with a simple questionnaire about a veterans work experience and interests and aligns them with civilian job opportunities. It also seeks to find out a veterans interests to see if they should seek training elsewhere to go into a new careerfield that can make them happy. Furthermore, a veteran is then offered a selection of mentors that can help them transition to the civilian workplace. The process is simplified and seeks to ease the anxiety servicemembers face when transitioning from the military workplace. By matching a veteran with a mentor we can seek to not only help a veteran land a job, but also ease the anxiety a veteran experiences by transitioning to the civilian workforce.
We live in a world where social connections can easily be established between veterans and that should be included in helping veterans land jobs and seek help with acclimating to a new job environment.
If interested in learning more about CareerMob please go to www.CareerMob.com