The U.S. veteran’s road to social integration and gainful employment after a tour of duty is paved with good intentions. But it’s not an easy one, as many veterans have found to their frustration and dismay.
Despite solid qualifications and skills—the latter, often forged and honed in the most difficult of conditions—jobs have anomalously been difficult to come by after they are discharged from the service. In fact, some 30 percent of all young veterans, through no fault of theirs, have fallen from the ranks of heroes to the ranks of the unemployed within months of their return. As shameful as that may seem, it is not all.
The average military family relocates every two or three years, with the family relocating six or seven times during a typical 20-year military career of the military head of the family. That portable lifestyle disrupts the constancies that civilian families take for granted: friends, schooling, and, especially, employment.
In a study of military families with military fathers and civilian mothers, researchers discovered that the more often the family moves, the lower the mother's wages become. The finding was not totally unexpected.
"Every two or three years, the military spouse’s career is disrupted,” reported Donald Haurin, a professor of economics and finance at Ohio State University and the co-author of the survey. “She starts in a job, earns a couple of years of job tenure and then has to start all over again, which has a penalty in terms of a lower salary."
The researchers determined that each "permanent-change-of-station" move pulls down a military wife's wages by approximately 2.8 percent.
The Department of Defense (DoD) has not been blind to the problem nor been deaf to the plaints of veterans like Josh Mehlin, a former F15E crew chief for the U.S. Air Force, who wrote for salary.com, ”Post Traumatic Licensing Disorder,” an illustrative article on the plight of U.S. veterans.
In response, the DoD has introduced a number of initiatives for the veterans as well as for the military family. One such is the Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts (MyCAA), a program which extends up to $4,000 in financial aid to military spouses who wish to get medical or legal training.
Meanwhile, meditec.com—a portal of education provider 360training.com—is doing its share to ease the veterans (or their spouses) back into gainful employment by providing online training in exactly the professions that are suited to veterans (jobs that need high skills) or to their spouses (jobs that can be done from home). Among the coursework meditec.com offers are: medical transcription training, medical billing and coding training, pharmacy technician courses, and paralegal training.
It is one small, but significant, step for the veteran to gainful employment.
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