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Empowering military veterans by tackling workforce challenges

#WorkingNationOverheard; Creating a strong veteran community
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For the hundreds of veteran-serving professionals who gathered for the Warrior Community Integration Symposium in Atlanta this September, the ultimate goal is to help ensure a better quality of life for all former service men and women who have served our country. In many cases, that means making certain veterans find meaningful, family-sustaining work once they leave the military.

Organized by the America’s Warrior Partnership, the Symposium is an opportunity to share best practices, find innovative solutions, and form new collaborative partnerships to better help the veterans in their communities address the work challenges they sometimes encounter when making the transition to civilian life.

AWP’s mission is empowering a collective community to empower veterans.

“The whole intent is to have a conversation about collaborating together and everybody working. What I say is no single organization is the puzzle. We’re all just pieces of the puzzle. We have to work together to create a solid, strong veteran community,” according to Jim Lorraine, the President and CEO of America’s Warrior Partnership.

WorkingNation set up its cameras at the Symposium and interviewed the speakers and attendees about the important issue of helping veterans deal with workforce challenges. You can follow the conversation on our social media under the hashtag #WorkingNationOverheard.

More than 200,000 service men and women separate from active duty in the U.S. military each year. Each veteran is different, but many of them report that they have trouble translating their military skills into civilian terms. This can lead to underemployment in their first post-military job and a lack of a sense of purpose in their work.

When it comes to finding a job, employers are looking for both soft skills and hard skills. Lorraine’s hard skill is that he’s a nurse. He spent 22 years as an Air Force Officer and Flight Nurse. He served in Saudi Arabia, Central America, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

“In the military, for the last part of my career, I really didn’t do a whole lot of nursing. That’s where I think the soft skills — leadership, organization, commitment, never quit, et cetera — played a big role. Being able to focus on multiple tasks, being able to keep the objective foremost, and then moving toward that objective with success,” explains Lorraine.

“Someone told me they can teach somebody to work a machine, if it’s a milling machine or whatever, or they can teach someone to perform a task, but it’s really tough to teach someone the values of showing up on time, without a substance in their system, with a focus on working together as a team, completing it, and moving forward,” he adds.

He believes that when a serviceman or woman is preparing to transition into the civilian workforce, they underestimate their value. “It’s unusual to find a soldier who says, ‘I know what I want to be when I get out.’”

He has worked with hundreds of men and women preparing to transition out of the military. “Usually when I talk to them and when I work through it with them, the first thing I’ll ask is where do they want to live. And then we go from where they want to live, what are the jobs in those areas, down to what they can do, what are their skills, and what are they interested in doing.”

Lorraine says he takes this approach because asking them, “What do you want to do?” is just too broad of a question. “If I go down to an infantry unit and talk to the soldiers about what they want to do after transitioning to civilian life, most don’t want to do anything related to what they’ve been doing. They want to do something completely different.

“They think that they don’t have the skills to go out and be successful. They sell their soft skills really short,” he tells WorkingNation.

These are the very skills that could put them on the pathway to a good job, with the right help. And that’s where America’s Warrior Partnership and all of the other veteran-focused groups are stepping in and lending a hand.

You may also like…

Salute to Skills: Workshops for Warriors and Hire Heroes USA

Constructing a Career: HBI turns soldiers into skilled trades workers

Watch the entire ‘Keeping America’s Promise’ Town Hall on veteran employment

Google helps Veterans find work

Civilian training programs tackle veteran underemployment

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.