Why junior officers are getting out

Sign up today. Jacey Eckhart is Military. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach and military sociologist who helps military members get their first civilian job by offering career-level Master Classes through our Veteran Talent Pool and on her website SeniorMilitaryTransition. Reach her at Jacey. Eckhart Monster. Twenty-nine of the forty-four men who have served as our nation's commander-in-chief have military backgrounds themselves Fellow Marines surely were thankful Bernice Frankel, better known as Bea Arthur, was a friend, traveling down the road and Interviews can be tough even if you're qualified for the job.

Study the 10 most common interview questions to prepare and Employers do want to hire hard-working, self-motivated veterans like you. The command does want you to keep firing on all cylinders until the last minute. Your family wants to know what will happen next right now. That is a lot of pressure. Do yourself a favor and take control over your transition by signing up for our exclusive FREE master classes now. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach and military sociologist who has been designing workshops and training active duty, National Guardsmen, Reservists and military spouses for decades.

Recruiters know a lot about hiring military, but there are some surprising things they don't know about you in military Veteran jobs can offer good pay, career growth, benefits and a Zoom account of your very own. But can you also find passion Two-faced, contradictory job seeking advice makes military transition even more difficult. The truth for you is often to be Should you pay a professional resume writer to write your resume during military transition?

Here is how a market alternative would work. Each commander would have sole hiring authority over the people in his unit. Officers would be free to apply for any job opening. If a major applied for an opening above his pay grade, the commander at that unit could hire him and bear the consequences.

Coordination could be done through existing online tools such as monster. Each of the four military branches is free to design its own personnel system, with minimal Pentagon interference. Yet each uses a similar centralized-planning department. It would take only one branch to lead the way by adopting the best practices of corporate America—where firms manage vast workforces by emphasizing flexibility, respect for individual talent, and executive responsibility.

Unlike industrial-era firms, and unlike the military, successful companies in the knowledge economy understand that nearly all value is embedded in their human capital. I traveled to Silicon Valley to learn about the organizational design of firms there, and also to learn about the talent ecosystem.

Nowhere is there a military-style year retirement framework that distorts career decisions, and no one offers the security of lifetime employment. Instead, Silicon Valley attracts talent because it knows the importance of flexibility. Companies, unlike military units, are born and die out constantly, and the massive flow of labor across and within companies is highly turbulent.

Like other veterans in corporate America, he credits his military training with sharpening his leadership skills. Happier workers mean higher productivity. In contrast, only one in five of the West Point graduates thinks the Army today does a good job matching talents with jobs. And nearly two-thirds agree that using an evaluation system that singled out the best and worst members of a given unit—for advancement or release—would yield a more entrepreneurial leadership.

Such a system, popularized by Jack Welch of General Electric, would give commanders better information, and also make personnel ratings a lot more useful than the politically correct write-ups in abundance now. It would also recast the personnel officers as headhunters, focused on giving advice, rather than orders, to job-seekers and to hiring commanders.

I asked Smith—a supremely tech-savvy, gung-ho leader—whether he would consider rejoining if the Marines recruited him to serve as a general officer, perhaps to command their cyber-security efforts. But he surprised me. He thought quietly for a minute.

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Entrepreneurs in Uniform. A Market Alternative. There are good and bad officers that want to make a career in the Army and there are good and bad officers that want to serve their time and leave. Because of this, many officers are forced to keep their thoughts about leaving under the radar until last minute. This is also, in part, because of the way the Army conceptualizes career development for its officers. For most officers, their career development model is based on that of their battalion commanders, brigade commanders, or military mentors.

These models are usually centered around taking command of a battalion upon being promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. A problem with this model is that not every officer that is promoted to lieutenant colonel can be a battalion commander simply because there are only so many battalion commander positions. Maybe the Army should think more deeply about how it could better develop officers for a wide range of positions that a lieutenant colonel could hold, rather than putting the primary focus on battalion command.

For the most part, in order to become at battalion commander, you have to have been in certain positions and performed well during your time in the Army, among which are company commander, operations officer, executive officer, and others. Officers who have made public their plans to eventually leave the Army are normally taken out of the running for some of these key positions even though they are ideal candidates for the jobs within the timeframe that they would still be serving.

Some officers are essentially forced to keep their thoughts about leaving the military secret for this reason, which can result in an unnerving relationship with their chains of command as they fear being made outcasts rather than being put to best use while they are still serving.

For example, an officer who seeks to appease only his senior rater at the expense of his subordinates will not likely receive favorable ratings from his peers and subordinates but an officer who seeks to appease only his subordinates at the expense of the mission will also not receive an overall high rating. Counseling is one of the best things the Army has implemented as an effective tool for mentorship but just like the MSAF, there is no real forcing function to ensure its completion let alone quality.

Similar to the MSAF, raters are required to annotate counseling dates but there is no burden of proof to show it was done and there is no implemented standard to ensure it is done properly. Thus, there is a disconnect between many junior officers and their supervisors in terms of their career goals and how to best achieve them.

This disconnect is why so many soldiers, NCOs, warrants, and officers alike feel that their organization does not care about them and thus do not feel obligated to put forth their best effort. This is not an indictment, just the reality of the situation considering human nature and the need for basic appreciation. The Army is not a meritocracy, especially when it comes to its pay system.

A Captain CPT working as a rear detachment assistant operations officer makes the same base pay as a Company Commander who led his company through multiple Combat Training Center CTC rotations in preparation for a combat deployment. While one is enjoying two-hour lunch breaks and figuring out ways to look busy, the other is putting in long hours and losing precious personal and family time to the rigors of command.

To add salt to the wound, while one may be competing with holdover CPTs who are transitioning out of the Army, the other is competing with other squared away CPTs who are also vying for a top block on their performance evaluation. When many junior officers see and experience this, their natural reaction is to think their talents and efforts could be better utilized elsewhere, which oftentimes results in officers deciding to leave the service.

Too often, leaders subscribe to the notion that presence equals productivity and this is a contributing factor for why many subordinates stay late despite having no more work on their plate. For those who are filling a position typically reserved for a higher rank or grade i. First Lieutenant filling a company command billet, Sergeant First Class filling a First Sergeant role , I believe they deserve to be paid according to their duty position and not their current rank.

There could be a standard for how much time they need to be in that position in order to receive higher pay. My recommendation would be 90 days or more because that is when the typical timeframe required to receive an performance evaluation.

In addition to the higher pay, I also believe that rated time should count even if the leader in question is not of the appropriate rank yet. A counterpoint to this proposal might be that those leadership positions are a privilege and that it would go against the notion of selfless service.

I agree that leadership positions are a position and not a right but financial stability is certainly a factor when it comes to retention. Soldiers are still people who have families to feed, mortgages to pay, and children going off to college. Ultimately, the Army is in a constant struggle with the civilian world when it comes to retaining its officers. It is not just the constant deployments or CTC rotations that cause officers to want to leave but also the rampant talent management issue, lack of control over their careers, and lack of work-life balance.