One Way You Can Help Your Company, a Veteran, and Our Country

Hire them to manage your projects!

Whoa Cowboy! How on Earth can hiring a Veteran as my company’s next project manager help my company, the Veteran, and our country all at the same time?

I’m glad you asked!

Benefits for Your Organization.

There are many benefits of hiring a Military Veteran as your next project manager, but here’s a few key ones.

First, they have all of the interpersonal skills identified in the Project Management Body of Knowledge as necessary for project management success. Down cold! When we are in the Military, we are either training for our next leadership position, in a current leadership position, or handing off our last leadership position in preparation to start training for our next leadership position. We are formally trained in schools, then trained on the job to make sure we can apply what we learned, then evaluated on how well we did, and then, if we did well, promoted to the next leadership position to rinse, lather, and repeat. We don’t learn leadership ad hoc.

Second, this command of leadership provides a bedrock for the others; team building, communication, influence, negotiation, motivation, decision-making, situational awareness, trust building and conflict management, and coaching. We operate in small team environments where these things aren’t luxuries, they’re necessity. We don’t accomplish objectives if we don’t work as a highly motivated, high performing team.

Necessity for what? For getting the mission done. Missions are like projects; they are temporary, they produce unique results, goods, services, or organizational capabilities, and they have parties interested in the results. In addition, Veterans bring honesty, candor, tact, courage, and critical thinking to the table. They won’t just tell your stakeholders how it’s going when the news is good; they’ll have several solutions for your executives to choose from to get things back on track when the news is bad. They steward scarce resources and adapt those they have to achieve the desired outcomes. Period. That’s the third one, they get results.

Fourth, we are used to being technically competent while simultaneously leading through influence. We have specialties, or rates, or occupations, that we are responsible to learn, perform, and mentor others in while we lead. In fact, many Veterans often perform the technical component of their job at levels higher than their rank. That’s the military way, lead and do, at a high level. Project management has those same two components; manage the project objectives while leading the project team.

This dedication, talent, and experience are proven, and oh yeah, you’ll always be the super star that hired them!

Benefits for Our Veterans.

During the period December 12, 2011, through January 23, 2012, Prudential Financial teamed up with the organization and e-Rewards, Inc., to survey 2,453 transitioning Veterans about the challenges they face transitioning out of Military Service. The very things they mentioned they needed in the study titled Veterans’ Employment Challenges (2012) are the very things managing projects for your organization can provide them. Let me show you what I mean.

The two biggest challenges Veterans searching for post-Service careers cited are “finding a job that is meaningful to them” (80%) and figuring out “how to translate their Military skills to a business environment” (79%) (p. 7). Project management is purposeful and familiar to them for several reasons.

First, it is team-based, and success is vital to organizational strategy and longevity. The results matter to their organization and its people; that’s the military environment too! That’s purposeful.

Second, they have spent years delivering results in austere environments with limited resources, and time. The skills and tools necessary to plan, perform, control, and report on mission after mission are the same used in project management; the skills transfer, it’s just a matter of translating them.

For example, a Plan of Actions and Milestones to them is a Project Schedule to Civilians. Lessons learned to Civilians are an After Action Review to Veterans. Moreover, a situation report, or SITREP, is to a Veteran what a Project Status Meeting is to a Civilian. Project Management gives them a language in which they can discuss their skills.

Third, the sample of Veterans identified four key skills as transferable to a post-Service career: 1. leadership; 2. problem solving; 3. ethics; and 4. time management. All four of these skills are critical to be successful in the role of project manager. They get to use what they’ve learned.

This force of project managers inside your organization will be motivated internally to do a superb job because the work is meaningful to them and uses the talents and skills they honed during their service. There is no substitute for the power of this internal motivation; you can’t train that into someone! Oh, and did I mention that you’ll always be the super star that hired them, recognized for bringing this organic competitive advantage to your organization!

Benefits for Our Country.

We’ll need 6.2 million project management folks by 2020 alone! More than 250,000 Veterans a year transition out of the Military Services, a number that’s not going down anytime soon. One source pegs this at 8 out of 10 Veterans leaves their service without a job! This has been resulting in about a 10% unemployment rate of late (give or take a point or two), which costs us and our organizations a Department of Defense unemployment bill of about $1 billion a year, and inflation isn’t declining. As you’ve seen though, you can help solve this problem.

The Bottom Line.

Hire a Military Veteran as your company’s next project manager, and you’ll help your company enjoy increased agility, profitability, and competitive advantage; you’ll help a Veteran perform a job that’s meaningful to them and one that they’re already experienced in and trained to do; and you’ll help bring down our country’s unemployment rate and bill. It’s a great fit all around, a true win-win-win! In addition, you’re the one who made the excellent hiring decision that brought it all about. Well done; you’ve actually created a win-win-win-win situation.