“Hiring veterans is just the right thing to do,” said Thomas G. Tomasula Jr., director of domestic staffing at Lubrizol, a 7,000-employee firm that makes petroleum additives, industrial lubricants and other specialty chemicals. But, he said, translating the military’s defined structure to the civilian world is not easy, which is one reason why Lubrizol has joined a new effort aimed at placing veterans in hard-to-fill manufacturing jobs.
“Clearly, there are some skill sets in the military that can be attractive to what we do,” he said, “but the military is more defined, there’s more black and white. In business, there is more gray. The challenge is to help people be successful in this grayness.”
A Pew Research Center survey released this month found that large majorities of veterans say the military helped them get ahead in life. They say the service builds character, maturity and self-confidence. Yet, 44 percent of veterans who served in the past decade called the transition back to civilian life difficult — nearly double the rate of veterans who served before them.
Veterans receive preference when applying for federal and a wide range of other government jobs. They qualify for government-funded education and job training. Industry groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce host job fairs aimed at veterans. And a host of firms target veterans for jobs they consider hard to fill.
But such programs have not significantly reduced the jobless rate among veterans.
“There are not that many people who have a military background, and they need to go about the process of learning how military skills relate to other jobs,” said Bill Scott, a vice president at Bradley-Morris, a career placement firm that focuses on veterans.
In northeast Ohio, the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network, a business group, is teaming with the Veterans’ Service group of the state Department of Job and Family Services on a project aimed at matching returning veterans with manufacturing jobs.
The idea is to translate veterans’ military job skills into civilian ones and match them with hard-to-fill jobs, such as machinists and technicians.
“There is a gap between what the military has trained people for and what employers need,” said Judith Crocker, director of education and training at MAGNET. “Also, veterans are often not very articulate in describing what they learned and what they had done in the military.”
The effort has attracted 43 manufacturers interested in hiring returning veterans, for jobs that pay as much as $28 an hour. The employers project filling 240 jobs over the next several months.
Kim Smith, marketing manager for the Pipe Line Development Co., a 97-employee firm that is doing a fast-growing business selling pipeline repair parts, said her company is eager to hire veterans.
“They have sacrificed. We know they are very disciplined and they are trainable,” Smith said.
Some veterans complain, however, that such sentiment does not always translate into jobs.
Trenton Marshall, 25, shipped out for the Navy in 2005. He was in Jacksonville, Fla., for most of that time, training and working as an aviation machinist’s mate. “I was a helicopter mechanic,” Marshall said. “I spent two years training and doing aircraft operations, refueling, launching aircraft.”
When he left the Navy and returned to Cleveland in 2009, he struggled to find work. Places such as Walgreens and McDonald’s passed on him, he said.
He did land a job at Wal-Mart, where he said a supervisor announced that he would be paid $7.40 an hour — 15 cents an hour more than usual rate — because of his time in the service. That job did not last long.
Now he is out of work, waiting to start school at Cleveland State University, where he plans to use his veteran’s benefits to train as a physician’s assistant.
“I hit the revolving door,” he said. “In interviews, people are all smiles. ‘Thank you for your service. You did a great deed.’ All of that. But then you’d get a letter saying you are unqualified, and you sit there like ‘say what?’ ”
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