Veterans Successfully Apply Battlefield Skills to Workplace

Colonel Tom Hiebert (Ret), a veteran and Senior Director of Veterans Initiaties at ADP, is helping other brave soldiers transition to civilian life by teaching them how to transfer their skills from the battlefield to the office.

9/27/16 #1897

 

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"The public television family is honored to welcome with us Colonel Tom Hiebert, retired colonel, the senior director of Veterans Initiatives at ADP. Good to see you, colonel. Thank you, it's great to be here. You were just telling me, before we got on the air, you call yourself a quote unquote "army brat". Define that. So the military's always defined "army brats" as the children of serving active duty military, and so I grew up all over the world, my father served in the Army for 33 years. I grew up in Germany, Japan, Korea, all five of my brothers and sisters served in the military, I married a gal in the Army, and all three of her brothers served in the Army. So I, you know, I truly am a military brat raising military brats. Thank you and your family for your great service to our country. ADP, this connection to helping veterans. What is...? You've been there for 14 months at ADP? I have. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? And I'll complicate it by asking this. What are the challenges that veterans are facing as they come home in terms of finding employment? Well the big challenge is veterans being able to translate their skills, and in many cases, employers all over the country aren't really familiar with what those skills are. So at ADP, we really believe that veterans possess incredible integrity and innovative spirit, they're initiative driven, they're resilient, and they have this commitment to service that we believe, at ADP, really fits in well. But in addition to, you know, those intangible skills, they also have spent their time in the military being trained in leadership and management and all sorts of other tangible hard skills that we believe, at ADP, we can take advantage of. So what's the mismatch? I said to you before we got on the air that my sense is that there may be a mismatch... a mismatch between what vets bring to the table as potential employees, as leaders in the workplace, and what some... some potential employers think they bring to the workplace. There is a mismatch? There is. In some cases? Yes. Yeah so I think a lot of it is a perception, a lot of it is a stereotype of what people who are unfamiliar with what veterans do while they're serving those skills they possess. And so, at ADP, we spend a lot of time talking to our hiring managers about how the skills of veterans possess translate to roles at ADP, and I think we've been very successful so far. Break it down, give us the success as defined in different ways. Give us some concrete examples of that success. Yeah so the year before I got here, to now..."