David Smith, the former vice president of service for CompuCom Systems, said vets-to-hire training gave him the leg up he needed when he returned in 1970 from a tour of duty in Vietnam. There, the infantryman had been assigned the M-60 machine gun — skills that weren’t exactly transferable to the budding information technology industry. “At that time,” said Smith, “there was no A+ or CompTIA to help veterans gain the skills needed to work in the IT industry.”
Back then, the military was collaborating with big companies to promote Project Transition, which offered military training to returning servicemen. “You would attend training for a half a day at a company facility and do your normal military job for the rest of the day,” said Smith. “I remember applying to several participating companies and then being accepted into a 12-week training program with a company I had really never heard of called Xerox.”
During Smith’s graduation from the program, an instructor stood on stage and recounted a class of 24 that had not only all passed, but had shown up on time and every single day for training.
“He also went on to say he had seen so much teamwork where one student would just go help another student who was either struggling or falling behind,” Smith said. “Something you learn in the military is the importance of discipline, reliability and teamwork, I have always remembered that speech throughout my entire career.”
The speech made such an impact that several years later, when Smith was in management and his company struggled to find young job candidates who came with both business maturity and reliability, he knew just where to turn. “I remember thinking back to that speech my instructor gave at our graduation class and started to think, ‘How could we find more young men and women coming out of the military and looking to enter the job market?’” Smith said. He started tracking them down and, realizing veterans brought a strong sense of loyalty, reliability, dependability and teamwork, spent the next 35 years hiring more than 50 of them.
“I also found that these individuals had a strong sense of responsibility and professionalism that was reflected in the customer satisfactions surveys we did,” Smith said. “Two of my last hires before retiring were veterans and one was recently honored at our Annual Managers’ Meeting for his team’s performance in having the best customer satisfaction results for the year, or 12 consecutive months of performing above CompTIA’s On-Site Service Benchmark, the industry benchmark.”
Veterans Today Have Different Needs
These days, Smith stays involved with several different veteran groups and, based on his years of corporate experience was asked to help returning veterans prepare for job interviews with major corporations. “I was very surprised to learn that many of the questions they would ask were different than what they were 35 years ago,” Smith said.
Rather than asking questions about corporate jobs, many were interested in starting businesses, he said, asking for information on writing a business plan, getting financing and the legal ins and outs of starting a company. “Veteran choices are to either return to school or find jobs that will allow them to gain these skills,” he said. To help veterans in the future, the industry needs to come up with programs focused on business skills in needed in our industry today, from networking to marketing and sales techniques.
Programs like U.S. Tech Vets also help returning veterans find jobs in IT. CompTIA partners with this online community and because of the association’s support for U.S. Tech Vets, its members can post vet-related jobs for free on Monster.com and access veteran resumes in a database of more than 970,000. Creating IT Futures Foundation, the philanthropic arm of CompTIA, is another program that provides veterans with marketable skills. Read more in this week’s CEO Corner, where Todd Thibodeaux talks about both programs and how CompTIA supports veterans. And hear how CompTIA members feel the industry can help returning veterans in the first piece in our Veterans Day series.
Michelle Peterson is a communications specialist for CompTIA.
