Need a skilled worker? Hire a veteran!
American taxpayer’s spend hundreds of millions of dollars to train the individual members of our armed forces in a variety of skills other than using weapons in mortal combat. Many of those skills are easily transferable to civilian occupations, but federal and state bureaucracy stands in the way and prevent employers from utilizing the members of this the highly-skilled veterans’ workforce to grow the American economy.
Combat medics
Saving lives and treating injuries and illnesses requires the same training in the military as in the civilian sector. That training should be recognized, respected, and utilized by hospitals and healthcare practices throughout the United States without requiring those highly skilled veterans to go back to a classroom. They can be and should be immediately integrated into the American healthcare system without further delay.
Any combat medic is by training and unfortunately by experience a qualified advanced EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) ready to ride an ambulance or emergency service vehicle anywhere in the United States and provide the highest level of life support for people who have been injured. According to NPR (National Public Radio) Morning Edition, every military medic and hospital corpsman gets more than $100,000 worth of training and then acquires years of experience treating everything from dehydration to blast wounds.
Yet, when they return to civilian life they are denied the opportunity to continue their lifesaving work because many states do not recognize the extent of their education and training in the military nor do they respect the service they have performed as combat medics. In many States and municipalities they can’t even ride in the back of an ambulance.
There are between 30,000 and 50,000 former medics and corpsmen who have been unable to obtain employment commensurate with their training, skills, and experience. Many states make these highly trained medics start school all over again and only six states make it easy for combat medics to even become EMTs, much less Emergency Room Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, and Physicians’ Assistants.
Congress should insist that any combat medic be certified upon discharge as a qualified advanced EMT and that every state should be required to honor that certification and permit those veterans to continue their saving work as EMTs in any of the United States.
Truck drivers and heavy equipment operators
If your Military Occupational Specialty MOS indicates you are qualified to drive a truck in Iraq or Afghanistan, nothing should stand in the way of driving a commercial vehicle on the Interstate. Driving a truck in a war zone like Baghdad or Kabul should certainly qualify a veteran to drive a truck in any American city.
The same is true of operating heavy equipment. Operating a backhoe, a bulldozer or a crane in a military uniform is no different from operating the same equipment in civilian work clothes.
It is up to the Department of Defense to see to it that every returning veteran whose MOS indicates they have skills transferable to the civilian job market receives whatever specialized training might be necessary to obtain whatever icenses and certificates necessary to function in the civilian job market. Congress should prohibit any State from requiring additional certifications in order to allow these highly trained veterans to be employed anywhere in the United States.
The MOS system and transferrable skills
The United States military has had a comprehensive system of identifying, classifying, and designating occupational skills since World War II. Every member of the Armed Forces of the United States service person has an MOS (military occupational specialty). The methods of classifying the skills of a member of the Armed Forces are much more detailed and rigorous than the conventional job descriptions used by Human Resource (HR) managers in the civilian world. An MOS provides much more information about the actual skills the individual possesses than can be obtained from a conventional resume or even a curriculum vitae, and certainly more than can be ascertained from a college diploma or college transcript.
It should be no problem for HR managers in any modern business organization or government agency to immediately find one or more MOS classifications in the modern military which would qualify a veteran to fill an outstanding job opening.
The immediate action which should be taken
The short-term solution is for the President of the United States to direct the Department of Defense and the Department of Labor to immediately establish a formal directory and classification of transferable skills which “map” military occupation specialties to job titles recognized by the United States Department of Labor as existing in the national economy today.
Where individual states insist upon local certification or licensing for certain occupations, the Department of Defense, should establish a certification program equivalent to the certification and licensing programs of the states and before a veteran is discharged they should be given the necessary special training to obtain a certificate in those fields commensurate with their MOS. Then
Congress should promulgate legislation prohibiting any state from denying a license or certificate to a veteran who has obtained the appropriate certificate.
What stands in the way of immediate action?
Unfortunately, these obvious solutions to both the current labor shortage and unemployment among veterans are all but impossible to implement with the current bureaucracy managing both the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Implementing the “obvious” solutions
The Veterans’ Administration is broken. Let’s fix it!
It is time to make the Department of Veteran Affairs part of the Department of Defense so that every member of the Armed Forces will always be a part of America’s military family from the time they enter the service.
There should be no difference between the medical care and treatment provided to active-duty service persons and veterans. The medical care and treatment members of the armed services and their families are entitled to during their period of active duty must continue throughout the remainder of their lives as veterans .
The savings in bureaucracy by making the present Department of Veterans Affairs a Fourth Department in the DOD along with the Department of the Army, the Deparment of the Navy which includes the Marine Corps and in time of war, the Coast Guard, and the Department of the Air Force which inclused the Space Corps, will help pay for the additional services the members of our Armed Forces require both while in active duty and throughout the remainder of their lives as veterans.
Starting immediately with combat medics and other military healthcare personnel who are now veterans seeking employment and all of the veterans who were trained to operate trucks and heavy equipment, there should be no shortage of competent workers to fill available jobs, assuming those jobs pay a living wage.
We must always remember and never forget our combat veterans.