Getting out of the military can be an exciting time — a chance to put hard-earned experience to use in the private sector. But when a job offer doesn’t materialize and time drags on, it can be an incredibly daunting period.
“No one talks about the pressure that you have if you’re not able to land a job and you have three kids and wife, or a husband,” said Jai Salters, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, who, on Wednesday, launched the Mil Mentor program through Service to Success.
Mil Mentor is a career platform that aims to pair service members and military spouses with industry experts who work as volunteer mentors to help them navigate different career fields and paths.
“What people don’t talk about is, ‘how do you get out of that spiral?’” said Salters, who’s currently serving as a cryptologic warfare officer. “It’s defeating. So how do you pick yourself up when you’ve been beat down for a full year, and for me, it’s mentorship. It offers accountability, and motivation, and helps you handle a situation like that, and it also offers visibility in the industry.”
Service to Success is a for-profit business that offers career support to veterans and military spouses free of charge and is intended to be a one-stop shop as military personnel break into a new profession or career after leaving the service. The service offers mentorship, access to an online job portal, workshops, and career events, like job fairs. The organization’s revenue is driven through event sponsorships, said Salters, who is the CEO of Service to Success.
Courtesy photo.
When it comes to beginning a new career after the military, having an informed guide can be crucial.
“If you don’t have yourself plugged into the game and you try to jump in head first, it can be a stark contrast from what you actually expected,” he said. “How to understand how to get from point A to point B from someone who’s already there is one of the best passages.”
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While making a lateral move from a military occupational specialty to a similar one in the private sector may require swapping buzzwords in favor of plain English, applying military experience to an unrelated career field can be a challenge.
“Your network is your net worth, that’s what a lot of people say, right?” Salters said. “And so being able to have the sphere of influence of folks that do that, and to have them help guide you — that’s the reason why we wanted to push that in that direction.”
Although military veterans have lower unemployment rates than their civilian peers — 2.8% for all veterans compared to 3.6% for nonveterans in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — that initial period after leaving the service can be a shock to the system.
“It’s a culture shock,” Salters said. “You’re going from being able to just follow orders and do what you need to do and everything’s kind of laid out to you. And now it’s like: How do I figure out this career path?”
In other words, swapping the clear, albeit rigid, hierarchy and structure of the military for the flexibility and independence of civilian life can mean losing some of those guardrails and built-in support systems.
But just because you’ve left the military, doesn’t mean you are on your own.
For a rank-and-file service member considering a career change after getting out, Salters said “the first thing they need to understand [is] the direction that they’re going,” adding that “they need to be able to talk to as many people that are aligning with the direction they want to go, so they can kind of figure it out.”
That way, they don’t have to start from square one, and can instead figure out where they want to land “and then reverse engineer that,” he continued. “That helps you at least understand the layout of the land. It’s not going to be the same as the military.”
To launch Mil Mentors, Service to Success has partnered with Act Now Education, a non-profit that offers employment resources to service members and veterans, and Boots to Books, a nonprofit that provides educational resources, from certifications to textbooks, tutors and college application assistance for the military and veteran community. (Task & Purpose is owned by Recurrent Ventures, which also owns Military Influencer Conference. Act Now Education offers tickets for Military Influencer Conferences to their members.)