Perhaps one of the most common questions on ACP AdvisorNet is how to write a civilian resume using existing military experience as source material. It is cause for great frustration and anxiety. Most know that while the civilian world may face many of the same problems and solutions as those experienced in the military, the way business describes these problems and outcomes is very different. In the military, we learn to speak “military-ese” and while this form of shorthand jargon serves us well to communicate complex ideas and information, it will completely baffle most civilian hiring managers. Indeed, getting a foot in the door and into the first round of interviews may very well depend on how well one makes this critical transition.

As a former Captain in the Army Medical Service Corps I experienced this first hand. While transitioning, I had the good fortune to take courses with a company called Orion that helps young military officers through this difficult process. And while Orion focused on officers, the knowledge they gave us applies to everyone leaving the armed forces. My goal in this white paper is to impart on you what I learned during this course as well as anecdotal insights from seven years in the civilian sector where I was charged with hiring talent. I’ll start with some misconceptions and end with straightforward advice and rules-of-thumb.

Misconception #1: My military experience is only applicable to government jobs.

Patently false. Anyone in any role as a leader or manager has the requisite skills business is looking for… any business. The goal is to explain how you approached a problem, the actions you took, and the results you observed. For example, a squad leader or platoon sergeant is assigned to a new unit. The first thing he/she does is size up their people. You begin to ask questions like: 1) What are their strengths?; 2) What are their weaknesses?; 3) Who do I trust most?; 4) What fundamental skills are they lacking in?; 5) What is my plan to rectify this situation?; 6) What are the expected outcomes?

If you can put this to paper in the form of a resume, you are 70% of your way there, because every business or project or endeavor all follow a similar story arc. It is called the problem, action, result (PAR) format and is the basis for every successful resume. PAR is a technique to express complicated situations and their outcomes concisely. I talk about it more below, but I encourage you to look online for more detail.

Misconception #2: I lack the higher level education that all companies seem to want.

This is partially false. It really depends on the industry you want to enter and your expectations of where you want to start. I can say with all honesty that I value maturity and experience more than degrees. When I hire people, I want to know if they have the street smarts and gumption to give the extra effort. True, if I were hiring people for an investment banking position I’d look for MBA training with financial modeling skills sets. Likewise, if I were hiring for management consulting positions, I may want to see a BS degree in one of the STEM fields. STEM fields are our go-to fields. That's not to say other fields and majors are excluded. Again, the point is experience is valued above all else, as long as it's apropos. More importantly, I judge people on presence and how they handle themselves in front of people. Granted, degrees and by default the resumes that advertise them work into the calculus of getting the first interview, but again I’d rather see someone in person who looks like a manager, rather than reading about it on a piece of paper. This is where networking comes in.

Misconception #3: Specializations have a leg up in the current labor market

If you've spent time in the US military over the last fifteen years, and I suspect that’s a great majority of you, then you have perhaps one of the most coveted military specializations of them all: real world experience during conflict. It’s just a matter of putting that experience to paper. All of the Fortune 100 and a significant number of the Fortune 500 companies have programs designed for veterans. They realize, as do I, that soft skills are just as important as the hard skills. Because of this realization, they will spend time with you on jobs training. What they can’t teach, and what you bring to the table, is the ability to not only survive, but thrive under duress and make a good situation out of a bad one, with constrained resources, under tight deadlines, and often with vague or limited guidance from leadership. If this sounds familiar please continue reading.

Perhaps some of my best interview candidates came from combat arms fields. I say “best”, because my style of interviewing is to place pressure on the candidate and see how they react. Routinely the best candidates can explain how they took a problem, made a decision, and stuck to the plan regardless of the questions I throw at them. We call this quality “presence” and it’s amazing to see someone who can defend a decision or argument under withering criticism. Veterans do well with these questions. My best candidates under these circumstances have been those who 1) took their own path; 2) are high-achievers; and 3) are veterans in general. You can make your own conclusions.

Resume writing steps and rules-of-thumb:

These steps assume you are transitioning from the military and not attempting to make a lateral transition after spending time in the civilian job market.

Step #1: The first step is to work from a framework that has historically done well in the past. I like the Wharton Business School format for new graduates. I like it because it is rational, pragmatic, and uses white space to draw the eye to what matters most. If you search the internet, you’ll find copies of this framework.

Step #2: Take a sheet paper, or your laptop, or whatever and begin to write down in reverse chronological order all of your most significant positions and contributions during your military service. For each, write down the situation when you first came into the position. Then write down your assessment of the situation. We call this the “As-Is” statement of the problem. Then write down the expectations of performance, or qualifications or any other metric you can think of and then document the gaps between where you were and where you needed to be. We call this “gap analysis.” Then document the ideal end state you wished to achieve. We call this the “To-Be” model. Finally, write down the plan you developed, the outcome, how you assessed the outcome through testing, and final any remedial actions needed to get the real world outcome as closed to the ideal “to-be” model.

Step #3: Once you feel confident that your data matches what actually happened, and you can remember vividly why you did what you did under the circumstances, it is time to translate this into the PAR format on a resume. PAR stands for problem-action-result. This framework means that you state concisely the problem you faced, the action you took to remedy the problem, and the result that was observed. The challenge is to winnow down all of this information into concise statements that are very clear, direct, and to the point. Use “action verbs” and an “active voice” when writing these sentences. If you need a refresher on what those mean, do some research.

Step #4: Quantify your results as much as possible. Your results should include statements like:
• responsible for
• Time saved in man-hours per
• Money saved over
• Percent increase in
• Proficiency increase over
• Selected over number of people
• Etc…

Step #5 Make a Venn Diagram of 3 attributes

1. Take a sheet of paper and pen
2. Draw 3 circles that overlap one another.
3. For each separately, write down 1) what you are good at; 2) what you like to do; and 3) what people will pay you to do
   4) The intersection of those 3 sets are where you need to be. Write it down and live by it.

For example, I like to fish. I love to fish. I could spend the rest of my waking days fishing. I'm good at it, but I'm not good enough to be paid at doing it. That's the difference.

Quantification of skill is important and being mindful of those skills is important. The point is that quantifying results is shorthand for communicating to your future employer that you speak their language. Business, after all, is about making money with constrained resources. Communicating that you can add value to the bottom line is what it's all about.

Rules-of-thumb

1. Use a well known resume framework. My favorite is the Wharton Business School framework
2. Use PAR format and quantify your results as much as possible
3. 1 page per ten years of experience. For example, 6 years in the military = 1 page; 20 years of experience = 2 pages
4. Nobody cares anymore about what paper you use. Print it out on whatever copy paper you have.
5. Make both a Microsoft .docx & .doc copy as well as a .pdf copy for digital submission
6. For those starting out, education always goes on top. Experienced job seekers put theirs on the bottom and have a executive summary at the top (to explain all the years of experience). Executive summaries are no longer than 3 or 4 sentences.
7. Don’t bother with a “references available on request” statement. Most companies have a separate form for that information and many ignore it anyway because the information is biased.
8. I like to put a short section at the very bottom about personal information like interests and hobbies. It’s up to you, but people have a wide swath of interests and sometimes something will stick out that’s truly interesting, and then you spend significant time on the interview talking about this one point. It speaks about your individuality and can make a interview go your way.