CLEVELAND — As soon as Brian Joseph graduated from high school he joined the Army, where he was trained in a series of jobs that seem to exist only in the military.
He was a multi-channel radio operator. Then he worked as a single-channel radio operator. Later, he worked as a psychological operations specialist, tailoring the U.S. war message to residents of Kosovo and, later, Iraq.
Unemployment among recent veterans
But since leaving the Army in 2008, Joseph has found that the rigorous training he gained during 18 years of military service means little to civilian employers.
“When somebody hears about the radio operator gig, they don’t immediately see a civilian application,” he said. “The same for psychological operations. It is really marketing, but they don’t know what it is, and the thing they associate it with is brainwashing.”
Joseph, 43, who has bounced in and out of jobs since returning home, is confronting a problem that is common among job seekers who have left the military in recent years.
Despite the marketing pitch from the armed forces, which promises to prepare soldiers for the working world, recent veterans are more likely to be unemployed than their civilian counterparts.
Veterans who left military service in the past decade have an unemployment rate of 11.7 percent, well above the overall jobless rate of 9.1 percent, according to fresh data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The elevated unemployment rate for new veterans has persisted despite repeated efforts to reduce it.
The latest to attempt it is the White House. In the jobs package President Obama has been promoting across the country is a tax credit of up to $9,600 for each unemployed veteran a company hires.
“If Congress passes this jobs bill, companies will get new tax credits for hiring America’s veterans,” Obama said at a community college in Dallas this month. “Think about it. We ask these men and women to leave their families, disrupt their careers, risk their lives for our nation. The last thing they should have to do is to fight for a job when they come home.”
But employers say such financial incentives for hiring veterans would not address the heart of the problem.
Lionel Batty, vice president of corporate research at GrafTech International, which makes graphite materials integral to products such as smartphone batteries and solar panels, said his firm is moving to hire more veterans, in part by trying to better understand their experiences. But, he said, tax credits have nothing to do with that effort.
“We’ll take them, but we don’t hire people because of tax credits,” he said. “We do what’s right for our business.”
More important than financial incentives for hiring returning veterans is making the skills and experience they earned in the military more understandable for civilian employers, experts say.
“There is not a great deal of knowledge with corporate America on a lot of the skill sets that come from the military,” said Stuart Keeter, a former paratrooper who is a vice president with Alliance International, a recruiting service that specializes in military veterans.
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