The right stuff

Translating Your Military Work Experience

Translating your military experience into resume form in a manner that civilians can recognize and understand can be a daunting challenge. Military personnel tend to speak in acronyms that are completely foreign to the average civilian. Ever newer weapons systems and new programs can cause even the recent military retiree to doubt whether they fully understand what is being said.

If you have worked hard to develop the skill sets described on this Web site, you should have some of the words you will need to translate your military experience to something that is understandable. You want to be able to create descriptions of what you did in a manner that makes it come alive in the mind of the person. A good exercise to get you started in the translation of these skills might be to role play a description of your skills:

• What would you say about your years in the military to your teenage niece or nephew?
• Explain what exactly it was that you did during your years in the military to old Aunt Sarah who hasn’t had any exposure to the military.

Even though this may sound simplistic, it helps you to articulate your skill sets in a way that civilians can understand and appreciate. Be aware of how you can describe skills you did while in the military and use them in a new career in the civilian workforce. By simplifying your skills into understandable chunks of information you can explain the transferability of your skills from your military career to your new civilian one.

Understanding Your Skill Sets

Another important aspect of knowing yourself is to carefully examine the different sets of skills that you have developed in the course of your military career and in the course of daily living with your family and in your community. These skills can be broken down into three sets:

• functional or “transferable” skills,
• your technical skills, and
• individual self-management skills.

Functional skills are core skills that you have learned throughout the years and usually are the skills you enjoy using most. These are skills that can transfer from one job to another, from one type of career to another. Some examples of functional skills would be managing, writing, counseling, coordinating, assembling, or composing. Go to the Functional Skills worksheet (PDF) to check off a list of your functional skills.

Another set of skills is the technical skills you have acquired while in the military or on your own by learning a hobby or as a member of an organization. Technical skills may be job specific; such as calculating a field artillery round’s trajectory, or more general, such as running a complex computer program that many people in your industry need to know. Technical skills can also include

• organizing data,
• assembling specific things or objects,
• using telecommunication equipment.

Complete the Technical Skills worksheet (PDF) to create a list of your technical skills.

The last set of skills generally developed by those in the military are self-management skills. These important skills show an employer how you “fit” into the environment of your new job. They are the “hire me!” skills. Given two equally qualified individuals with the same education and background it is usually the unique self-management skills that determine which one will be hired. Examples of self-management skills are:

• organized time manager
• flexible and fair minded
• clear headed and direct
• friendly with a sense of humor.

An excellent way to help you determine your most prominent self-management skills is to ask a significant other or very good friend to help you fill out the Self-Management worksheet (PDF). Often we are blind to our best selves and it takes another person to show which self-management skills best describe you in a job situation.

Completing the following skill identification exercises will provide insight into transferable skills and descriptions you can use as you begin to interpret your background for others:

• Functional Skills
• Technical Skills
• Self-Management Skills
• Specialized Knowledge