Part 2 The Military ONLY Taught me to be a "Fill in the Blank"

This is the second of a four-part series designed to make transitioning veterans think of the hard, technical skills they bring to the corporate world along with their tremendous leadership and soft skills.

Part two is focused on roles that every single Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine could qualify for, but isn’t necessarily a specific career field in any of the services. If you have ever trained for or operated in a hostile environment; if you’ve had equipment break down and had to find a workaround; if you’ve had a plan fail, but were still expected to execute on the objective; if you've trained or conducted exercises with the Ability to Survive and Operate (ATSO); if you’ve ever had to build, maintain, or exercise Continuity of Operations (COOP), Contingency, or Operational Plans; then you might have the skills to be successful in some highly desirable corporate roles. So, what are these roles?  Almost every large company has roles in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Response, or Incident Management, and almost every veteran inherently possesses these skills.

Think of Business Continuity as operational planning. Like the military, businesses do advanced planning to address potential incidents or breakdowns in their business processes. Consider the business continuity plan as the operational plan you test during peacetime and pull off the shelf during wartime and adjust as part of your contingency operations. Exercises are planned and executed to test the veracity of the plan and may be conducted in coordination with third party vendors (think joint exercises) to ensure issues can be resolved and processes recovered within an expected time frame to deliver the product or service to the customer.

The term Disaster Recovery is mostly used with IT system failures and oftentimes associated with catastrophic failures. It’s planning and prioritizing how systems are recovered when there is a failure. Good disaster recovery planning includes building, maintaining, and testing the plan end-to-end. When multiple systems fail, the plan includes the order of priority that applications and systems are recovered. 

When it comes to Incident Management or Emergency Response, think of these roles as working on a Crisis Action Team (CAT) or base Command Post. These teams might monitor the news, internal stressors, or environmental activities that might impact the business. These teams coordinate how, when, and where the business responds. It acts as the liaison between the business and the first responders (EMS, Police, etc.). They are also usually on point to communicate up (to senior leaders) and out (to the employees or public) when a crisis occurs. This team is also charged with getting leaders to act and make decisions in times of crises and/or disasters.

After 9-11 and the BP oil spill, regulators are significantly more involved in this space, so a high level understanding of the regulatory agencies and requirements involved in your chosen industry is also helpful. 

Regardless of the role, candidates must meet all minimum requirements, and as many of the preferred qualifications as possible to be competitive. Do advance research into these fields to gauge your skill level and interest. Compare the roles you’re interested in across multiple companies to see what it takes to qualify for that role. Join talent networks to be notified as soon as new openings become available. The veteran brings more than soft skills to the table, but only you know what you’re capable of doing.

If you missed Part 1 of this series, you can read it at the below link.