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The transition from active duty to civilian life can be a difficult process for veterans. According to Elizabeth O'Brien, vice president of Hiring Our Heroes, this transition "happens multiple times over the course of our lives and our career."
The US government spends $13 billion annually to help transitioning veterans. However, more can be done to make the process easier. O'Brien, the wife of an active duty military member and the former senior director of the Hiring Our Heroes Military Spouse Program, explained on Yahoo Finance's Warrior Money podcast how community members and the government can do more to help the whole family when a veteran transitions.
"Transition is a family game," she said. "If you have a partner [or a family] at home, this has to be done in partnership. I think, No. 1, we have to make sure that military spouses have a pathway to economic opportunity. We know if a spouse is employed before transition, it increases the likelihood that a service member takes the right job on transition because they're feeling less of that financial stress to provide for the family.”
Unfortunately, military spouses also face their own hardships maintaining a steady income. O'Brien noted that military spouses have a 21%-24% unemployment rate, which she says is “unbelievably high.” Oftentimes, military spouses struggle to climb the employment ladder due to differing state certifications and a military member’s need to relocate frequently.
"The first nine years of our marriage, we moved seven times in nine years. Two of them were overseas,” O'Brien recounted. “As a college basketball coach, the opportunities that I had to take — I was going backwards in my career, basically just being grateful to plug into a college basketball team. And at one point, I turned around, and I was at the same level that I had started a decade ago.”
In addition, 60% of transitioning service members earn less in their first job outside the military, and 61% of those members “feel underemployed in the first three years,” according to O’Brien. That makes for a very difficult process for the whole family.
To address the issue, O’Brien helped create the Skill Bridge program, which allows veterans to begin a job 90 days before their active duty ends. This gives veterans and their employers a chance to see if the career is a good fit before the service member is discharged.
But O'Brien urged that military families don't just need a helping hand from the government but also from fellow Americans.
“The sooner we can build networks and social capital for military families as they move to new communities, the better,” O’Brien said. “We have the same challenges that so many of our American families have: access to safe, affordable childcare, reentry to the workforce. Our challenges aren't unique only to us. We have additional challenges, but there are solutions that we can create for our military families that then benefit America at large.”