Nords? Are you there? We need you!
<shines Nords bat-signal in the sky>
Sorry, I don't check the forum every day. In fact this week I'm about 400+ threads behind and just clicked the "Mark as read" button.
I would've seen this thread when I searched for my name, but I clicked on it for its intriguing title!
Sorry it took so long to write back. When I really take a hard look at my situation; I know I have nothing I should be worried about but still can’t figure out why I do it. I think over the last couple of years I’ve been trying to figure out all of my weak areas. It’s kind of like building a castle and thinking maybe now I need a moat…then maybe some more guard towers…then “fill in the blank”.
I am going through a big life transition where I'm taking about a 60% cut in pay. Fortunately, it is a military pension and my monthly budget is lower than what I will get paid. I feel that I’m set for my transition but I will need to find another job but I can take my time finding one.
Things I worry about:
- Been in the Military since I was 17; so I don’t know Civilian life
- I’ve never had to apply for a job
- I’ve always been told what to do and where to go
- I have all this freedom now but don’t have a direction (Nothing pulling me)
- I have a ton of skills but no Certifications (Only real experience)
- The closer I get to retirement the more worries I have
- I only have my income to rely on
- What if I find a job and it’s miserable (I don’t want to ruin my permanent record) lol
- Most entry level jobs want a BS or a couple years of experience (Say what?? Thought it was an entry level job?)
- Should go back to school to get some hard credentials?
- What if I can’t find a job?
- What if? What if?
Good news is:
- I’ll have a pension
- Debt free (Including House)
- No Wife or kids (Guess it wasn’t in the stars)
- I have 18 years of Mechanical skills. Pretty much everything: Diesels, Gas, Gas turbines, generators, pneumatics, hydraulics, heating, air conditioning, electronics, and freq converters. (Already been offered a part time job fixing landscaping equipment and might have something lined up at Andrews AFB)
- Leadership Skills, Supervised over 65 troops
- 3 years as a budget analyst with a $3M operating budget and conduct contract agreements (I’ve seen some good jobs posted for this same position at other bases and the pay is good. Leaning toward this)
- 1 ½ years as a Production Superintendent for 62 KC-135’s (Might get me something at an Airport)
- Six Sigma-Green belt in Military terms
- Thought about starting a business but I need to work on my business plan
- I have the post 9/11 GI bill
I don’t understand why I’m so worried all the time! I read about the FU stories and I can’t imagine ever having that much cojones to do that sort of thing. Even if I had the FU money something deep inside me tells me to keep pressing on or would still worry about getting fired. Why is that??
All of these feelings are perfectly normal.
In fact after 12 years of retirement I still regularly (every few months) dream the nightmare where the Navy notifies me that there's a problem with my records and I have to go back on active duty for a few years. Of course those nightmares are mild compared to the ones where the U.S. Naval Academy audits my conduct record and recalls me to finish serving out the rest of my restriction marching & musters-- and I escaped from there over 32 years ago. But I digress.
Your "worst case" scenario is the one where nobody ever wants to employ you or even talk to you, and yet even in that scenario: [your income] > [your expenses]. You could live just about anywhere in the world, in a RetireEarlyLifestyle.com manner, and never work again.
You may already have figured out what I'm writing in the next few paragraphs, so I apologize if I'm preaching to the choir. But the rest of this post may turn on a lightbulb in a few lurkers, so I'll write it at the risk of repeating what you may have already read.
You will never know civilian life. I'm not even sure what that means. The habits and behaviors you spent over half your life acquiring will serve you well after the military. You'll still run your life pretty much the same way you do in uniform, but you just won't have to shave so much. You'll have a lot fewer rules to follow, too, and you could really let yourself go, but you won't because your personal (internalized) standards are too high. I know that police officers, medical professionals, university professors, and high-ranking government officials feel the same way about being a "civilian" without access to the same lifestyle and camaraderie that they used to enjoy-- along with all of its stress, deprivations, and frustrations.
The fact is that most "civilians" envy the fact that you belonged to a "life" with purpose and mission and structure and rules and hierarchy and roles where you always knew who to be and where to go and what to do. They think you sit around on your assets all day ordering people to do stuff, and that you have no idea how to do anything for yourself. Some of them think that you don't even know what to do when someone says "No" to you-- except beat them up or put them on report. But what they don't understand is that you can tap into the people's internal motivations which will make them want to do the things that need doing, and you'll never even get the "No" word.
If you miss your life in uniform (or don't like what passes for civilian life) then eventually (almost subconsciously) you'll seek out your kind and join another tribe. You'll become a member of a veteran's group or you'll take a job with a company that's at least 50% military veterans or you'll join a non-profit filled with military retirees. You may fit in with groups where there's sports coaching, particularly (excuse the irony) martial arts. Or you'll find a new identity with another tribe like "surfer" or "personal finance blogger".
One of the reasons that nobody has offered you a job yet is because you may not have put yourself out there for a full-power run of networking and resumes and interviews and a definite start date. Other employers won't even contact you until 181 days after you're retired (especially civil service and defense contractors) because of the military's ethics regulations. All of that stuff is on Linkedin when
you give a crap about it you're ready. It may be tedious or even discouraging but it's not complex and it's not hard. You'll simply have to spend a lot of time finding out about the things you don't want to do (from people who won't seem to ever say "Yes!") until one day it all comes together with ridiculous ease.
About that experience and those credentials: take a look at your military base's college support office-- the one where they have "skills assessments" and "interest surveys" and "discovery software". Your service's website (the one behind the CAC login) will also have a module that goes through your service record to interpret your billets, ranks, and training certificates to their civilian equivalent. In Pearl Harbor it was the "Navy Campus" building and the website (which was already tapped into your service record) translated your experience into college credits and degrees. (Back in 2001 the urban legend was that an E-7 with 22 years of experience found out that his record was the equivalent of two bachelor's degrees and a program manager certification.) When I was in uniform I thought CLEP was a military program, but it's a national labor education program. Your base's education services office can guide you toward the CLEP exams and more certifications than you'll even care to have-- let alone resume bullets.
One of your job-search challenges may be that you're more suited for running a business than being employed by one. I've read literally hundreds of business plans over the last seven years, and most of them are boilerplate Word documents filled with crap. The good business plans fit on one side of a piece of 8.5"x11" paper with big margins. The outstanding ones fit on a paper napkin. Read Chris Guillebeau's "$100 Startup" and check out the veteran's entrepreneurial resources in the Google doc at this post:
http://the-military-guide.com/2013/07/25/entrepreneur-resources-for-veterans/Your skill set screams "facility manager", "repair service", and "support contractor". If you were in Pearl Harbor then you'd be running the operations & maintenance of the submarine training center's simulators & trainers-- including the tactics computers, the firefighting trainer, and the damage control (flooding) trainer. The aviation equivalent would be a career at FlightSafety International. If you wanted to build a website then you'd be the FixItNow.com Samurai Appliance Repair guy... you probably can't tell that he used to be a Navy aviation electronics technician.
Do not suffer from the "military inferiority complex". Frankly the worst problem you'll have to solve will be finding the people who want to work with you, and they're probably already lurking a few months down the road into your retirement waiting to pounce on you.
Right now your biggest "problem" is having some time off to relax and rejuvenate. Take a few months, take a year, maybe take two. You will not go stale and you will not lose all of your "contacts" in your "network". You could spend three hours a day updating your Linkedin profile and joining Linkedin groups and reading books and blogs and forums. Take a break during your terminal leave-- you've earned it-- and then you can take the rest of your life a few years at a time.
I particularly recommend this blog post:
http://the-military-guide.com/2011/01/06/the-fog-of-work/and then you can browse the archive posts between January - April 2011 starting here:
http://the-military-guide.com/2011/01/Those posts are mostly chapters 8 & 9 from the book, but you'll have to read the library copy (or pony up for a Kindle version) to read the personal stories that are part of the book.
Here's an example of being in the civilian world: last Friday I was at an investment lunch of ~30 people who I've known for at least five years. One of them, Jay, knows me very well from our families socializing together. As the lunch meeting was breaking up I was introduced to a guest named Nathan, who pointed out that we already knew each other. He's a Navy veteran and a submariner who was at my final training command as a student (for about six weeks) and later as an instructor (a year). Although Nathan and I worked mostly in different buildings with different jobs and groups, we already had a shared
trauma background. He left the service about a year after I retired and we haven't seen each other in over a decade. Jay was standing next to us as we spent five minutes catching up on that decade and then started swapping sea stories and shipmate names. This went on for at least 20 minutes.
As Nathan and I parted (with more conversations to come in the next few months), I realized that Jay had probably seen me "light up" in a way that civilians rarely see me do. I was with a guy who shared my background, experiences, and three-letter acronyms. We immediately bonded. He's spent most of the last decade pursuing a corporate career, which he really didn't care for. Now he's come up with a brilliantly simple civil-engineering idea that can easily be designed in to new-construction homes or be retrofitted to existing properties.
He was "only" in the Navy for seven years, so technically he's a civilian. But more importantly, he's a military veteran. I know already that he has a leg up on at least 80% of the other entrepreneurs I've met over the years. He's using his military skills (persistence, initiative, motivation) to turn an interesting idea into a business. I know what he could accomplish when he was in uniform, and I'm really going to enjoy watching what he does with his startup.