When Does Your Veteran Status Expire on the Job Market?

Your status as a military veteran lasts forever in this country. You can always get your military discount at Lowe's and Home Depot. Bob Evans and Applebee's (and a hundred other restaurants) will always look forward to seeing you on Veterans Day. The federal government will track you for the rest of your natural life. Tell that to the Dalai Lama, Veteran.

Does Your Veteran Status Ever Expire?

It does on the job market, where most of your military experience has a shelf life. An expiration date. A best-if-used-by stamp. Like, uh, milk.

Even though the federal government will always count you as a veteran when you apply for a position on USAJOBS, and your civilian employer may count you as a veteran in your profile, the value of your military experience has an unofficial expiration date.

Most veterans do not know. (Or maybe they do not want to know. I'm not sure.) Just last week, I was talking to a guy who was retiring from the Air Force after 26 years of service. "I want to do something completely different," he told me. "I can always do defense or government later. Those will always be waiting for me."

Always? I thought my eyebrow was going to spring right off my forehead and scurry away. While my heart (and, evidently, my eyebrow) goes out to every job seeker who wants to make a big change, there are certain realities we all need to keep in mind on the job hunt.

Your Unofficial Expiration Date

One of those realities is that even though your status and your identity as a veteran will last as long as your DD214, the value of that status on the job market is a little less durable. This is especially true for jobs with government contractors and the federal government.

Granted, the defense industry and government can't possibly hire every one of the 180,000 veterans who leave the military each year. They offer significant employment opportunities, though. According to LinkedIn data, defense and space, government administration, and airlines and aviation are all industries that recruit and hire veterans at a higher rate.

Thinking of these industries as your backup plan is no backup plan. Here are the three ways your veteran shelf life expires in the civilian world:

1. Your Security Clearance

If your last job in the military required a security clearance and you are enrolled in the continuous evaluation process, your eligibility for reinstatement will last for two years after military service. This makes you highly attractive to defense contractors whose contracts specify which employees must have an active or current security clearance. Once it lapses, you have to be sponsored by a company to get a new clearance -- which is harder than it sounds.

2. Your Experience

Employers hire people for their hard skills, not their soft skills. They hire you for what you can do. They hire you to solve a problem. For those in defense and aviation, they hire you because you were the most recent user of their product. You know how it works in the field, in the air, out at sea or in space. You know glitches, and you can see opportunities. You have relevance that fades in a short time.

3. Your Contacts

If you are retiring from the military, I know you are telling yourself that you don't want to "sell your Rolodex." I don't blame you. I bet you can get big bucks for it on eBay, along with your printed copy of the Yellow Pages, your IBM Selectric and that touch-tone phone.

If you are leaving the military from a senior-level position, know that no one is going to ask you to stalk the halls of the Pentagon passing out plastic swag. That is not how business works. One of the things the defense industry wants from you is your familiarity with how the military and Congress make decisions on what they are going to buy to defend the country. That process shifts and changes all the time. Your familiarity helps shape what comes next, which is just another way to serve the country.

Seeking that "something completely different" might be exactly where you need to go after your military service. The defense industry represents only 2.7% of the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP.

Depending on your state, technology, information and media, manufacturing, professional services, financial services, or hospitals and health care might be a better industry for you.

Give defense, aviation, shipbuilding and government a good hard look when you transition from the military. It can bridge the life you have with the life you want next.

Find the Right Veteran Job

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