Take advantage of the benefits you deserve

Steven:

When I was recruiting for the Air Force, and all the sister services utilize education or the educational benefits as part of a promotional aspect of features and benefits of their service. What I found was ironic, though, is that although they are provided access to education, graduation rates for military are extremely low. In the last couple years, I want to say the national average for the graduation rates of all graduates in an undergrad program, the military comprise less than 4%.

To be competitive, a good deal of the time these individuals get out of the military and they’re in society competing and have nothing to show for it. They’ve slayed a lot of dragons, they have a lot of medals and a lot of awards, and yet at some point in time on the bottom of a resume, nothing to do with education, nothing to show how they invested in themselves to gain their education.

My 23-plus years of experience, you know, told me that as many accolades as they may have acquired, you know, if I didn’t have a bachelor’s, master’s, or something to account for that, all the rest of the awards didn’t really matter to the civilian world. A lot of employers are very patriotic and they’ll grant you an interview. But at the end of that interview, they want to know if you can start on Monday. You know, can you make them profitable at whatever they do. And they tie an education into that.

I think the latest statistics that I saw, although I want to say the current unemployment rate is around 9.2, I think for the military it’s somewhere around 19.2. And that’s, you know, that should have people stand up and pay attention. A good deal of it has to do with the lack of education that they have. That, you know, that’s critical. So I have joined with a university to go out and promote continuing education programs.