It’s not enough to list your name, rank and serial number with your dates of service on your resume. You will get much more out of your experience by explaining it in a way that civilian employers and bosses can understand. By translating your experience from military jargon into business-speak, you can maximize its value.
The military has a language all its own, and after several years of service you might not even realize that everything you say about your military experience sounds like a foreign language to most employers. Start by spelling out the acronyms. Military alphabet soup will only confuse and annoy people who read your resume.
You can unpack some of the military jargon by using more words to describe your duties. “Efficiency” is part of military-speak, but for someone who doesn’t understand the jargon, there are just a lot of details left out. Try describing the tasks you completed in very simple steps, as if you were speaking to a child. Remember: you don’t get credit for the steps you leave out, because a civilian employer is not going to be able to assume what you did.
In describing your accomplishments on your resume, you may have to take some creative license. Most tasks completed in the military involve a team, but to highlight your accomplishments, you have to single your own actions out from that group. It may feel awkward at first, describing your own individual actions. The team is not here applying for the job with you, though, and your potential employer needs information with which to evaluate you.
You will do a better job of translating your military experience into usable information on your resume if you understand what civilian employers are looking for. The job titles often don’t translate well, so you have to focus on general skills.
Here’s a list of qualities that are usually used to evaluate job applicants for civilian positions:
- Number of people supervised
- Size of your budget
- Schedule worked
- Number of people served per day
- Types of training received
- Monetary value of supplies and materials managed
- Evaluation performance
Whether your materials were missiles or two-by-fours and the people you supervised were soldiers or salesmen, your experience is relevant. It’s up to you, however, to make it clear to your potential employer how it compares to what they’re looking for.
