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Returning medics often are unable to immediately translate their skills into jobs

Underemployment remains a challenge for many veterans
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More than 200,000 military men and women make the transition into civilian life each year. Unemployment among veterans is relatively low, but underemployment continues to be a big issue for the former service men and women.

Over the past decade, underemployment for veterans has increased by 38 percent, according to the LinkedIn Veterans Opportunity Report released late last year. Among the potential effects is that just a small portion of a veteran’s skills are being put to good use in the workforce.

Joan Lynch, WorkingNation’s chief content and programming officer, tells the New York Times that she has “encountered many returning medics who were unable to immediately translate their skills into jobs—even when they had privately tutored medical residents on skills like suturing—because they lacked a license. At the same time, those extensive experiences may not apply in other, often lower-wage jobs for which they are vastly overqualified.”

But there is hope. Lynch cites a program started in 2015 by Dr. David W. Callaway, a Navy veteran himself, to help veterans translate their experience and training as military medics into civilian work. The program—a partnership between Atrium Health, Wake Forest School of Medicine, and the U.S. Defense Department—leads to credits towards a master’s degree and a license as a physician’s assistant.

This is just one of many programs designed to help veterans make a smoother transition into civilian life and to help employers get the benefit of the veterans’ skills and experience.

You can read more about these programs in our extensive WorkingNation coverage of veterans and work: Our Veterans Deserve Good Jobs.

You can read the full New York Times article here: Veterans Are Working, but Not in Jobs That Match Their Advanced Training

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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.