Veterans make great employees, and the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development (MDHEWD) offers a number of ways for former military personnel to find jobs and for employers to hire veterans.
Tom Whitehead, workforce development supervisor at the Missouri Job Center in Arnold, said area employers have good success when hiring veterans because they often have traits like loyalty, hard work and commitment.
“Our employers have been very good about hiring veterans,” he said. “They really appreciate our veterans because they have those qualit ies.”
Linda Ragsdale, market delivery lead at Manpower in Festus, said her company also likes to place veterans in job openings.
“We look at them very seriously and try to help them out as much as we can,” she said. “We do try to place them right away. They have such great transferable skills. And they’re very reliable. They were on call 24/7, so working a second shift to them, or third shift, is nothing.”
Shams Chughtai, veteran program coordinator for the MDHEWD, said most veterans need to continue to work after serving 20 years and retiring from military service.
“Most individuals continue to work because most folks who enter the military enter at a young age,” Chughtai said. “Most service members, most of the time, have a career after they retire.”
That is where military programs and workforce programs step in to help.
Helping veterans
Chughtai said when people are preparing to leave the military and are seeking employment, they need to take advantage of the Transition Assistance Program, which provides information, tools and training to help service members and their spouses prepare for civilian life.
Part of TAP is helping the service member find a career track, which is where the MDHEWD steps in with its Veterans Employment and Training Service program.
“The TAP process basically ensures you have been exposed to the requirements that the Department of Labor has for what you will need in the civilian world,” Chughtai said. “Make sure you have a resume. Make sure you are aware of labor information for where you are going. It is a several-days-long process.”
After TAP, veterans can lean on two workforce development programs – the Disabled Veteran Outreach Program and the Local Veteran Employment Rep.
At the Missouri Job Center in Arnold, 3675 West Outer Road, there are two specialists who working with the DVOP and one LVER specialist, Whitehead said.
Chughtai said the specialists in these two programs also are available to assist veterans at Fort Leonard Wood.
DVOP specialists work one-on-one with veterans to help them overcome barriers to employment, like a lack of education, housing or other resources or a problem with substance abuse, Chughtai said.
The LVER specialists advocate for veterans, reaching out to employers and helping veterans land jobs.
“The DVOP (specialists) are working with them to get them job-ready, take care of all their barriers,” Whitehead said. “(DVOP specialists) move them over to the LVER (specialist), and he goes out and advocates for them. It’s a good system.”
Along with help from the Missouri Job Center, veterans can go to websites like careeronestop.org, which has a page dedicated to veterans and has a job-matching tool that helps those in the service translate what they did while serving into a civilian job.
Other websites that match veterans with employers are hiremilitary.us and recruitmilitary.com.
Employers seeking veterans
Show-Me Heroes On-the-Job Training, also known as OJT, helps employers get service members, National Guard members and their spouses ready for jobs.
Through the OJT program, the MDHEWD will pay up to half of a person’s salary as he or she transitions into a job after leaving the service.
“It is based on how much time they will need to transition into the workforce,” Chughtai said. “For example, if someone exits the military and let’s say they were a welder on an aircraft carrier, that is unique welding that you would do in the Navy. If they transition to welding in a machine shop, which is a different skill set, we will write a contract that looks at everything they will be doing, experience they have and let’s say they determine you will need an additional two months of training to transition from welding in the Navy to what you will do with an employer, we will pay part of the person’s salary for two months.”
Chughtai said there also is a career skills program at Fort Leonard Wood.
In that program, when someone in the service is getting ready to leave, they can complete an unpaid internship for a few months.
“Ideally, what we would like to see is when they are placed with an employer, after they are done with the (internship) and exit the military, they will seamlessly come back to the employer and continue their employment,” Chughtai said.