Memorial Day is Monday, May 30. As the day approaches, we want to pay tribute to all of the men,  and families who have served our country, and to those who have given their lives in service. We thank you for your dedication,  and sacrifice.

A few years ago, President Obama announced a challenge to the U.S. private sector – hire or train 100,000 unemployed veterans or their spouses by the end of 2013. A number of companies nationwide took on that challenge and started veteran-hiring job fairs to attract military talent. There was only one problem: Many companies struggled with how to translate service members’ talents to private sector jobs.

In an organization with complicated military specialties and ranks, it can be difficult (and daunting) to determine exactly how to decode a veteran’s experience. Capt. Karin Vernazza, SPHR^® (Senior Professional in Human Resources^®) is Chief of Protocol for the U.S. Special Operations Command. She has spent a number of years creating an “HR Decoder” to help simplify  experience for the private sector.

She says that most people in the U.S. do not have  education in  structure and  and that most of what we know  from the movies. “Most people have a hard time even identifying the five armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Core and Coast Guard),” she says. “Military recruiters are challenged daily to fill that education gap, and veterans are equally challenged to identify their skill sets for civilian employment.”

To create her decoder, Vernazza researched civilian business models of expertise levels and then aligned military pay grades to them. She then worked on  targets. Vernazza says this was the most elusive task, given that base pay in the military is misleadingly low. She wanted veterans to understand what salary they would have to make in order keep their standard of living. To do this, she factored in national pay averages, comparable housing allowances, exceptional medical benefits and other significant tax advantages for military personnel.

Vernazza set the salary targets within an approximately 15-percent range, depending on the area of the country and the desired skill sets. “If a veteran doesn’t have a highly competitive skill set, then he or she will be on the low end of a target,” she says. “However, if the veteran is a nuclear-trained engineer, for example, he or she will most likely exceed the 15+ percent limit. Each veteran has to negotiate his or her unique value to an organization.”

The Basic Military Veteran HR Decoder is included in the linked article and is meant to help bridge the military-civilian gap for better understanding and veteran-hiring success. The core element that integrates the two experience-based systems is the “military pay grade” located at the bottom of each civilian specialty building block.

There is a similar white-collar and blue-collar structure, with officers (O’s) and enlisted persons (E’s) progressing in seniority from 1 to 10. The relative size of each pay-grade block represents the relative population of that block compared to the others. The majority of service members range from E1 to E4. They enlist at age 18 and serve one or two tours of duty ranging up to six years of service.

Review the Basic Military Veteran HR Decoder in our article on Decoding the Military for Veteran Hiring Success.

What makes military veterans special? Aside from their courage, they voluntarily take an oath to serve our country. Vernazza says the military  the organization and its people in a common mission – to support and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Connect with Karin Vernazza, SPHR on LinkedIn

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