Experts: Vets should be marketed to employers - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Experts: Vets should be marketed to employers

In tough times, employers need little reason to turn a candidate away. For some, a link to the military is enough.

“Civilian employers are increasingly not hiring those in service,” retired Navy Reserve Capt. Marshall Hanson said at a Thursday hearing before the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on economic opportunity. Hanson is legislative director of the Reserve Officers Association.

Among the obstacles veterans face today, panelists said, are employers’ misconception of post-traumatic stress disorder, fear that a reservist will be deployed, and/or ignorance of how military job skills translate into the civilian world.

The military needs to translate its persuasive enlistment campaigns into the widespread marketing of veterans’ skills to employers, said Justin Brown, a legislative associate with Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Raymond Jefferson, assistant secretary of the Veterans’ Employment and Training Services, said he envisions more engagement with the private sector. “We should be talking to rooms full of employers instead of one on one,” he said.

But the government should do its part to hire more veterans as well, panelists said.

“Remove those employed by VA and DoD and there aren’t a whole lot of veterans working in the government,” said Timothy Embree of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Phil Rones, deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, tempered the high veteran unemployment numbers by saying they’re not that different from nonveterans, he said.

“Recent press reports have noted the high unemployment rate for 18- to 24-year-old male” veterans of the current wars, which was 21.6 percent in 2009, Rones said — only slightly higher than the rate for nonveterans of that age, 19 percent.

But veterans shouldn’t aim simply to break even with nonveterans, Brown said. “One unemployed veteran is too many.”

Veterans’ employment will be a hot-button issue for Congress going into the fall elections, according to congressional aides.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of the Senate Democratic leadership who serves on the veterans’ affairs and appropriations committees, is working on a comprehensive jobs bill for veterans that will try to improve transition services for people leaving the military, help veterans open their own small businesses, increase federal aid to state-based employment programs and allow the new Post-9/11 GI Bill to be used for apprenticeships and vocational training programs.