His supreme blogness, Glenn Reynolds, links to an NYT article on how American firms are increasingly warming to hiring former military personnel, on the grounds that the quality of such hires are getting better and are frequently far better than those who have never been in the armed forces. Hmm. It is the sort of story that might be dreamed up by an army recruiter saying: “Join the Army and when you want to quit, make a great life afterward”. That makes a lot of sense. For most people, a lifetime in the forces is not something they would ever want to contemplate, but a short spell, maybe. I know quite a few people who have got decent careers and businesses after having served in the forces, and I notice a few patterns. Of those I know, the following:
My father (RAF navigator): farmer.
RAF jet pilot: air traffic controller, West Drayton.
RAF Defence Rgt: Senior security manager, public transport.
SAS operative: security advisor, South Africa, Middle East.
Army officer, cavalry rgt: salesman, farmer.
Tank commander: hedge fund administrator.
Army officer: wealth management industry job-search executive.
Australian navy officer: property developer.
US navy officer, financial journalist.
US navy submariner: software engineer, paramedic, post-grad student at Columbia.
South African army: landscape gardener, property developer.
Army officer: property developer.
Army officer: pharmaceutical industry executive.
Army sergeant: pest control business owner (no irony intended!).
RAF tailgunner (WW2), social worker.
The last one always struck me as poignant. The man is now in his eighties, was a tailgunner on Lancasters during WW2 and saw his fair share of death and destruction. He ended up running a youthclub for kids in Pimlico for much of his adult life and one of my relations benefited from his tender care.
I’d be interested in seeing if commenters with military backgrounds ended up doing anything comparable to the stuff above, or something totally different.
I know quite a few ex British Army folk who are now in sales and management; a couple of ex Royal Navy radar techs who became IP network engineers, and some ex US Army folk who run their own IT security firm…
My father (RAN swabbie, WWII): lawyer, Senator, Federal Govt Minister, Privy Councillor, Lord Mayor
Australian Army officer: Network Engineer
RAN Officer: HR Manager in Middle East
RAN Officer: Investment Manager
My Uncle Jack commanded destroyers during the war and NATO convoys just after it, retiring as a Rear Admiral. He subsequently became a director of Securicor, and the Chairman of the Cwmbran New Town Development Corporation in South Wales, near where he lived. I know he did the navy stuff well, because he got a chestful of medals, despite being captured in the Italians as early as 1941. I don’t know how good he was at the civilian stuff. I’ve no reason at all to think he was not good.
There was, of course, a lot of this kind of thing in that generation, of middle-ranking officers during the war.
Edward Heath is another example who springs to mind.
In Israel throughout its existence it has been taken for granted that it is very difficult to get a decent job if one didn’t go through the compulsory part of their military service. It was never a law or anything like that, just somehow became a cultural thing. (This is slowly changing now, as the compulsory part being seen as more and more problematic, and more and more kids are evading the service under various pretenses).
Also, when I was at Essex University, the Vice Chancellor was a man called Albert Sloman, who gave the Reith Lectures about something like: what Universities should be like. He was a Lancaster tail-gunner during the war. He always had a haunted look about him, although he wasn’t old. He looked like a sort of young ghost. I’m told Lancaster tail-gunning could get very scary. Vice Chancelling for Essex University also had what would have been scary moments, if you’d not been a Lancaster tail-gunner.
See also (Johnathan) the remarks you quoted here by Keith Miller about pressure versus pressure, Messerschmidt up arse versus test cricket. No contest.
There you have it, I think. Warriors who have nearly died, or who have watched others actually die, are less likely to be phased by a mere business set-back.
Although, I recall reading or hearing somewhere that one of the after-effects of having been in battles can be an uncontrollably bad temper.
Depends which army.
I once had an experience in South America. I hired a guy who had served in the local army. The locals told me: don’t, these people are thieves and drunkards. I didn’t believe them and hired him anyway. They were right.
My own take would be as a manager… if my own next venture gets moving, I would mentally give extra points to someone with military service because they will have learned discipline and had a lot of the silly modern high school silliness knocked out of them. They will know what real stress is… and not be a bunch of whinging old ladies. (Not that all old ladies are whinging: I remember some pretty tough old birds from my childhood).
This all balances off against relevant experience of course, but all else being equal, I would expect someone from certain universities or from the military to be a safer bet.
Besides which, they’ve got better stories to tell. 😉
Father in law.
2 Para June 6th 1944.
Market Gardener and property developer.
Heavens Brian.Cwmbran!
Your uncles name wouldn’t be Howlett would it?
I used to work with a Robert Howlett, whos dad is supposed to have masterminded the builing of Cwmbran.
Wrote one of the most spectacularly dull books ever written about it.
We yanks want to know
How on earth do you pronounce Cwmbran?
I’d like to buy a vowel…
Cwm is Welsh for Valley.
So it is pronounced Koom like the english Combe,and the bran bit is pronounced Brahn.
So Koombrahn.
The place is an absolute shit hole by the way (sorry Brian but it is). I clerked the Court there many a time.
We Welsh get very pissed off at the BBC.
Everyone elses language gets checked for correct pronounciation but never Welsh it seems.
I was listening to a news report a while back, about a Meningitis outbreak in
Inis Ibble (that was the phonetic pronounciation I heard the English announcer say)
Inis Ibble? In mid Glamorgan? I was born in S Wales, never bloody heard of it!
Then I twigged that what they meant was-
Ynys Y Bwl.
Pronounced
Unis uh Bull
Simple really!
That’s interesting, RAB: you Welsh seem to be pronouncing ‘y’ the same way the Greeks (and consequently the Russians and the Bulgarians) do.
Well Alisa, we Celts had gotten about a bit
before ending up in bloody Cwmbran! 😉
My great uncle was the closest thing to a grandfather that I knew. He was a research chemist and had something to do with substituting titanium dioxide for lead in paint. His company payed him very well for that and he also was way up in management of the paints division.
It was a pleasant surprise when I saw family stories I had heard from childhood confirmed by a picture of him in full horse mounted cavalry uniform with his horse during WWI. Complete with jodhpurs and boots. He was apparently extremely athletic and competed in many sports. But by the time I knew him he was already quite old. His grandson, my father and I were pallbearers at his funeral but there was a turning staircase in the procession so the rest of the pallbearers were newly minted veterans from the local post.
I got a kick out of Dale’s reference to “tough old birds”. My father’s sister, among too many stories to remember, once set off alone up into the mountain jungles of inland Borneo with just an old army compass and a small pack. She was up there for many months and years later when explorers ‘discovered’ the tribes living up there, they still spoke of her. My dad’s other sister concealed Chinese from retaliation during the communist coup attempt and the bloody purges that followed in Indonesia during the ’60s.
RAB, thanks for the explanation.
All-in-all, I’d probably do as well as the hapless BBC talking head.
It may be wise for the Welsh tourist folks to issue a translator at the border to yanks visiting Wales, so that we don’t get mauled just trying to converse!
I have been a private through captain in the US Army & Army reserve. The most important thing I learned was organization of work to accomplish a goal. This has served me well as I have been employed for the last 30 years as a planner for several large industrial concerns.
I look to my service time as a good thing. I never went to university and being in the Army taught me many valuable lessons. Even so, my abilities were/are doubted by those who did go on to higher education and who used that education time to avoid serving in the same war as me. That’s OK, though. It led directly to my being employed in the UK for several years in the 70’s, which I still look back on as one of my favorite times in life.
This continues up to the present. Whenever this is brought up in, say, discussions about abilities & experience as related to pay raises/rises, I’m invaribly told some variation of “well, that was a long time ago” – even when I was still in the reserves as a Special Forces officer. Our unit trained like the regulars, just for less days a month. When I pointed out that at times I have been in charge of 200+ individuals and large sums of money ($1 million+), it was dismissed. So I rarely mention it anymore. I know what I am capable of and that’s good enough.
In answer to your inquiry now that I am done venting:
When I got off active duty, I intended to do a job that had nothing to do with anything service related. And I did for a few years. Eventually I came back to what I know. Despite the ranting above, my first boss in my first “grown-up” job had a background similar to mine and put me on the path to where I am now – within a few years of retiring. One other effect is that I have never wanted to be in charge again.
Many of my “Army buddies” have a similar story. A great many of my NCOs who stayed on active duty until retirement became US Postal employees after. Still don’t know what that means.
My father – artillery officer in WW2. Ultimately professor
Me: Infantry officer, including a year in Vietnam. Ultimately professor, though I have worked in commerce, banking, and I banking.
I see a number of MBAs in my line of work. The ex-military tend to be organized (they read the f— instructions and follow them), and take responsibility (hey don’t make excuses when they f— up). They don’t whine.
My father: Artillery officer in WW2. Ultimately professor
Me: Infantry officer, including a year in Vietnam. Ultimately professor, though I have worked in commerce, banking, and I banking.
I see a number of MBAs in my line of work. The ex-military tend to be organized (they read the f— instructions and follow them), and take responsibility (hey don’t make excuses when they f— up). They don’t whine.
In the last few years there has been a drive to hire former military as school teachers. This is a huge culture shock for all involved, but educators are beginning to realize that people trained in dealing with young adults under the most harrowing circumstances tend to make really effective high school teachers. For one thing, kids with weapons don’t give them the vapors so much. oh, and they know how to motivate people without wittering about grades and career plans.
Even more startling, here in the Seattle area retired officers became popular as school district supervisors after BG John Stanton took over the Seattle School District and endeared himself to the teachers because he treated them like NCOs and junior officers, as fellow profesionals – a huge improvement over the way they were used to being treated, and then went on to die tragically in office. They practically built a shrine to him, here in Left Coast Seattle. Bravo for life’s little ironies.
My late father was a Squadron Leader in the RAF and eventually Leutenant Colonel in a middle eastern airforce (they used army ranks)
When he gave up the military life, which he loved, he sold aeroplanes for De Haviland of Canada but after my parents divorced he gave up the aeroplane business and had two businesses of his own.
A role for which he was completely unsuited and it made him thoroughly miserable. He was (so I am told) an excellent officer and a superb pilot who flew just about everything during his career. He was like a fish out of water in civilian life. So much so that I am convinced that his disillusionment and unhappiness contributed to the illness that eventually caused his death.
I am not sure that the military life is always a good grounding for success. For my father his military career was actually the high point.
Former soldier (me), theatre stage manager, sales manager, Senior Anatomical Pathology technician (dissector of human corpses) and now Immigration Officer.
So you do get around. 🙂
I work for a medical instruments company that has quite a few former (and current) military members, myself included. The service academies are also well represented in my division. Most of my Army brethren are veterans of Iraq. I’ve served 2 tours. One guy is there now and comes home at the end of October and will be back to work in December. That will be his second tour. I was heavily recruited by my company in their effort to bring in more military officers. There is a definite push to bring us in. I was told we bring a certain can-do attitude that is, quite frankly, often missing in the general civilian population. We work well together and are used to a team environment. My boss and his boss are both retired Navy. Both on subs. I really enjoy my work and I think the people, especially the military folk, are a big part of it.
Having hired several utterly lazy and useless yoots over time, I would definately look to hire a vet.
My father was a navagator on B-17’s/B-29’s towards the end of WW2, came home, wanted to be a weather/met caster, -alase, brain cancer struck him down. RIP. My brother was a Combat infintry platoon (USA Army) in the “southeast asian wargames”of the late 1960’/eairly1970’s, came home and is a sells rep for a large corp making “stuff”-heat exchangers-that are NEEDED in the “green” economy. I’m still trying to live up to either of their ideals…and failing.
Where I work, we get two groups of applicants: recently-discharged vets, and recently-graduated college students.
One group doesn’t have to be told: to show up on time, that they will have to work nights or weekends, that the job is stressful, that they won’t be a detective right away, that they won’t always go home on time, that physical fitness and ongoing training are important, that there are sometimes risks and dangers and that in rare cases people die at work, etc.
The other group frequently has had no meaningful work experience prior to coming here, and will often whine and moan if they have to stay late. And they can’t grasp the idea that they can also be judged for their off-duty conduct.
It’s easier to take a recently-discharged SPC and give him the book learning and training that he needs, than it is to take a recently-graduated Bachelor of Whatever and fix a broken attitude and sense of entitlement.
The only hard part is with former MP’s: it takes them a little time to internalize that policing in the civilian world is an entirely different animal. The ones who learn that actually work out very well. The ones who don’t (usually retired SNCOs), well…
Actually, I can only think of one person who came here with a college degree and no military time (tried to enlist, denied for medical reasons) who made it to two years without quitting or being dumped. Now he sits around and posts on other people’s blogs and calls himself ‘bait’ or some damn thing.
Like Jacob says, depends which army.
Reynolds is referring to the special case of the US, which has an unusually large Army for a western state and a different culture from most of the west. It was quite common for people to join the US Army at the bottom specifically for the educational opportunities it afforded, and it sold itself that way. (It would be interesting to know whether that works quite as well now army life is noticeably more dangerous than it used to be.)
The British Army and RAF do sell themselves to potential technical specialists that way, but not to footsoldiers or officers.
It also depends what rank. I note the number of Jonathan’s British examples of officers, going into fairly standard upper-middle-class occupations. A tank commander in Britain is a cavalry officer under the carapace. A cavalry officer becoming Something in the City is considerably less of a surprise than James Blunt going from cavalry officer to slightly self-mocking pop-star. Other ranks I suspect are more interesting and there are more of them.
If you want extreme and amusing examples though, I’m acquainted with two ex-paratroopers: one is a hippyish artist and writer; the other (tho’ straight) is proprietor of London’s biggest chain of gay bathhouses.
I retired from the US Army as a Chief Warrant Officer. I was an instructor in helicopters and airplanes. After retirement I became an airline pilot. I’m now a captain on an Airbus 320. Obviously there was a definite transfer of skills from the military to civilian life!
A friend of a friend is an area manager for Amazon and he was a former USAF officer. Apparently, retired officers are quite sought-after in the corporate world.
My father was a Capt. in the Ordinance Corp (Nuclear) and just retired a couple years ago as VP of Human Resources of a large business.
My Uncle: US Army / Vietnam — University Professor.
My Other Uncle: US Army Air Corps / WWII — Insurance Executive.
My Father: US Army / Korea — Pharmaceutical Executive.
My Step-Father: US Army / Korea — Computer Systems Analyst.
Me: US Navy / Gulf War I — Software Developer.
Yeah, I had to be different.
Father – US Navy air traffic controller, served twenty years. Life after the navy – welder, farmer, postal worker, civil servant.
Mother – US Navy air traffic controller. Life after the navy – mother, real estate agent, auditor.
Me – US Army Signal Corps, retired as a master sergeant, now working in cyber security.