BridgeWorks
Memorial Day, which we marked on May 25, is for remembrance — for the service members who did not come home. It is right that the day stays focused there. But in the week that follows, we want to turn to a related and very much living question: what happens to the veterans who do come home, and how well does the civilian workforce actually make room for what they bring?
The answer, too often, is "not well enough" — and that is a failure of translation more than a failure of skill.
The translation problem
A service member spends years acquiring exactly the competencies the civilian economy is desperate for. A Military Occupational Specialty in a mechanical, electrical, construction, logistics, or operations field is, functionally, an advanced technical education. The person who maintained complex equipment under pressure, who led a team, who held a security clearance and a flawless safety record, has skills that map almost one-to-one onto the skilled trades.
And yet that veteran often lands in a civilian hiring process that cannot read their resume. A hiring manager who has never served does not know what an MOS code means, cannot translate "managed $2M in equipment" into "ran a maintenance operation," and defaults to asking for civilian credentials the veteran never needed because they were doing the actual work. The skills are there. The translation layer is missing.
Why the timing is good
The trades are short hundreds of thousands of workers, and the shortage is projected to widen. Employers that once had the luxury of demanding a perfectly conventional resume are running out of road. That pressure is, bluntly, an opportunity for veterans — and for the organizations that help bridge the gap. When an employer cannot fill a role, a candidate who already has the discipline, the safety culture, and the mechanical foundation of military service starts to look less like a translation problem and more like an obvious answer.
What the bridge looks like
The Department of Labor and its workforce partners have built real infrastructure around veteran employment, and our role sits alongside it. For the veterans we work with, the bridge usually involves:
- Credential mapping. Turning military experience into the specific civilian certifications and apprenticeship credits that employers recognize, so years of real work are not thrown away at the door.
- Resume translation. Rewriting an MOS-driven history into language a civilian hiring manager can read, without inflating or diminishing what the person actually did.
- Employer education. Helping the employers in our network understand what a given military background already guarantees them, so the interview starts from credit rather than from zero.
- Wraparound support. Recognizing that the transition from service to civilian work is not only a job-search problem, and connecting veterans to the broader support that makes a placement stick.
The point
We honor the fallen on Memorial Day. One concrete way to honor the living is to make sure the country they served does not waste the skills they bring home — that a veteran's first civilian job search does not turn into a slow lesson in how little their experience seems to count. It counts. The shortage in the trades is, if nothing else, a reason for the rest of us to finally learn how to read it.
