A few years ago, a growing manufacturing company began to think about military veterans as a pipeline for leadership talent. The company’s president, Jack, was himself a retired military officer and thought highly of job candidates with military backgrounds.

In anticipation of service members returning from active duty and becoming available in the civilian job market, Jack directed his recruiting team to pursue and track the hiring of veterans. He asked that they report their progress on a quarterly basis, and in the coming months, many former service members joined the company.

After the first 18 months of the veteran-hiring initiative, recruiters began to notice a trend: Many of the newer employees were being hired to replace the recently hired veterans. A check with HR proved that these individuals had in fact chosen to leave the organization sometime in the first 18 months of their employment. Information from exit interviews identified “lack of fit” as the most common reason for resigning.

Training and development for cultural fit

Unfortunately, this story is not unique. Many well-meaning organizations are experiencing a similar pattern among their military new hires. Smart companies that look beneath the surface are successfully turning it around and retaining veterans beyond the 18-month mark—well beyond.

The secret ingredient can be found in the exit interview data. Last year, MyMilitaryTransition.com surveyed two groups: military veterans and civilian HR managers, posing the question, “Why do veterans leave civilian jobs?”

Not surprisingly, the veterans identified “lack of cultural fit” as the most common reason for voluntary resignation. The HR professionals reported something similar. From their point of view in the organization, veterans resigned due to “an inability to let go of the military way of doing things.”

Throughout this article you will see sidebars containing case examples from coaching clients I have worked with over the years. So what is the solution? Interestingly, it does not lie with recruiting or HR. It lies with learning and development. Specifically, the solution is tailored onboarding for veterans. It doesn’t have to be complicated or costly. It just has to be done.

From boots to briefcase

The move from military service to civilian employment is fundamentally different from the move from one civilian job to another. The tacit learning about how work gets done is so familiar that it becomes second nature. Not so with the transitioning veteran. Many of the day-to-day activities that can bewilder and frustrate former service members aren’t even on the civilians’ radar as potential stumbling blocks.

Before a veteran can put your company-specific orientation material into meaningful context, some form of onboarding support is a necessity. Even veterans with some civilian work experience under their belts can run up against barriers that are, at their core, transition related.

The role of training and development

While every company and every veteran has their unique issues, it’s a safe bet that proactive training and development executives can help their company retain, engage, and grow their veteran hires.

Veterans are a group whose challenges can be predicted and who share some common issues, from one veteran to the next. This means that they can be well served by a group learning solution, which is far more economical for the employer than providing each employee with her own coach. Smart companies realize the value in providing tailored onboarding training and resources in the earliest days of a veteran’s employment, especially in light of the alternative: absorbing real and opportunity costs associated with learning in real time by trial-and-error, not to mention attrition.

The overarching theme that training and development can address is failed expectations. Former service men and women have had one professional employer, regardless of length of service—the U.S. military. Therefore, they leave the military with a set of expectations that is deeply ingrained. Viewing any civilian organization through the lens of military culture is a recipe for missed expectations based on faulty assumptions.

One of the most valuable aspects of tailored onboarding for veterans is that it provides a forum for discussing the basic expectations that career civilians bring with them from job to job. So it’s not just what the organization expects from the new employee, but what the new employee can reasonably expect from the organization in terms of day-to-day activity, pace of work, autonomy, and career progression, to name a few.

Start today to keep tomorrow’s veterans

Training and development professionals are uniquely suited to ease transitions and help veterans to become engaged, productive, and growing
professionals in the workplace. Here are tips to help make a measurable impact on the productivity and retention of veterans:

1| Prepare. Educate yourself about the most common pitfalls and success factors experienced by veterans in civilian organizations, and how to set the stage for success. Explore the range of accommodations for veterans with disabilities, and demystify the challenges.

2| Connect. Ask veterans to describe what it was like to be a new employee at your (or any) company, and ask line managers to describe their experiences managing veterans. Document what you hear, and look for patterns that can be addressed through a learning solution.

Personally connect with military new hires from day one. In fact, volunteer to be the one to greet them at the door—to translate, answer questions, make suggestions, and most importantly, be a helpful colleague that the new hire can reach out to in the coming days, weeks, and months.

Launch an employee networking group for veterans to share their experiences and help each other throughout their tenure. Acknowledge holidays such as Veterans Day and Memorial Day; they have significance to veterans and they raise awareness among
employees at large.

3| Manage. Learn to distinguish a performance issue from a transition issue. Provide training, coaching, and other resources to the veteran as part of the onboarding process to establish context and support.

The most important thing you can do, however, is something. Anything. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by all that could be done, and it can immobilize us from taking a first step. It’s often said that the great can be the enemy of the good. In this case, everything can be the enemy of anything.

Conclusions

So what happened to Jack and his manufacturing firm?

Today, turnover is the exception rather than the norm among veterans. In fact, the company has become known in the veteran community as a “military-friendly” employer of choice. It stands out from its competitors in the minds of potential job candidates coming from the military.

How was this accomplished so quickly? It began with asking veterans and line managers to describe their experiences, which led to another idea and another, until the company was a place that truly valued veterans and understood how to tap into their tremendous skills and experiences. Now the translation is easy, almost effortless, as the organization bridges the gap between civilian and military cultures.

Emily King is an expert on the transition from military service to civilian employment. She works extensively with organizations that hire and want to retain veterans, as well as with veterans directly. She is the author of the ASTD Infoline “Onboarding Veterans into the Civilian Workforce” and an audio course titled “Your Military Transition” published by King Street Associates; emily@mymilitarytransition.com.