Career Readiness & Professional Development

As we think about the journey after college, there is a saying that is applicable to planning for a future career,“The journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step.” For most of us, we are currently on a journey in our transition from the military and into higher education. So, let’s think about this nebulous journey through college and into a career as just a series of steps where we learn more about ourselves and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is where growth comes from, and is where the SVA Chapter can start planning for success!

To frame the conversation on how SVA Chapter Leaders can develop and take part in the process of helping their members become “career ready”, let us begin with a couple of definitions:

• Career Readiness – a foundation of core competencies that broadly prepares the college educated for success in the workplace and in a career through career management practices.  
• Professional Development – A process of earning, maintaining, and developing skills and knowledge to help successfully advance growth in a job or industry.

Broadly speaking, we want you to treat your SVA Chapter as an organization that helps to inspire and empower your chapter membership to take part in and achieve their their professional and career goals. A Chapter Strategic Plan will help provide the framework of success for a chapter member throughout their college journey and will also help with provide a more practical understanding of how 

With prior experience in the military, it is important to understand what skills and experiences directly translate and what do not. Often, the directly translatable skills learned and gained in the military are not enough by themselves to help us get a job once we graduate. Key research findings from the SVA Census Survey of the student veteran population show that “Roughly two-in-three student veterans say their current job is not at all similar to their former military specialty.” This corresponds to other national-level studies that indicate over 2/3 veterans in the workforce indicate that they are working in a job function or in an industry that is not similar to what they did in the military.   

Specific to your role as an SVA Chapter Leader, there are a few key skills you may already possess and may be actively developing like: 

• Communication
• Customer Service
• Critical Thinking
• Equity & Inclusion
• Leadership
• Project or Operations Management
• Professionalism
• Collaboration
• Teamwork
• Strategic Planning 
• Adaptability 

Identify and recruit student veteran members based on field of study.

Focusing resources, opportunities, or professional development programs or activities for your chapter membership, based on something practical like what they are studying, is a great entry point for a prospective or current chapter member to get involved and also helps keep new members involved outside of stand-alone events. Much of the early professional development of a chapter member might come from the skills and competencies that they are studying and learning about in the classroom. SVA Chapter Leadership teams can leverage the opportunity to learn more about why a prospective member chose their particular major or field of study and where they want it to take them next. Helping orientate and frame the mindset on future steps that a chapter member can take to prepare for their journey after college and in the workforce will help get them ahead of their civilian counterparts and will also tend to provide an incentive for members to stay engaged. 

Leverage a targeted outreach strategy for an SVA Chapter’s professional development events.

Doing this will help match the types of student veterans that you are looking for as members based on what their career interests are or based on what they are studying, rather than a blanketed approach to join the SVA Chapter while they are in school. Let’s say it again, “you don’t know what you don’t know” and most student veterans are first generation college students and might not have the first-hand experience of navigating the end of an academic degree and searching for a career after college. A helpful and very practical place to start building your Chapter’s professional network and connect to other networks and community of support is on LinkedIn. Some great ways to build your Chapter’s presence on LinkedIn is by:

• Creating a LinkedIn Group for your SVA Chapter and invite student veterans, alumni, mentors, industry experts, community partners, and employers to join this group and encourage participation by sharing resources and opportunities as a way to get the conversation going with group members, which will help establish “help-seeking behavior” as a norm for the community.  
• Optimize Group experience by sharing professional opportunities and events happening on campus and in the local community or with resources, programs, events, or articles from partners or from your Campus’ Career Services office.
• Use LinkedIn Groups to build networks and for professional development.
• Invite student veterans, alumni, mentors, industry experts, community partners, and employers to join this group and encourage participation by facil     
• Optimize Group experience by sharing professional opportunities and events happening on campus and in the local community.

Survey and assess the career interests and types of programs or events that your Chapter Members want or are interested in taking part in.  

Start by providing your community with a simple membership intake form that asks each member what military branch they served in, what job they had in the military, what they are studying, and perhaps a couple of questions about what types of employers, industries, or jobs or professional experiences that they are interested in. This will help survey and assess what your membership wants to take part in within the Chapter and gives your Chapter Leadership team a direction on what types of events or engagement opportunities to plan for the coming year ahead. This will also be a great opportunity to help provide them an incentive for being a member by letting their voice be heard and that your SVA Chapter is truly an organization that is focused on supporting members to, through, and beyond higher education.

Building your Chapter network

You may have heard a saying that goes “your network is your net worth”. Well, there is some truth behind that statement. Like in the military, we didn’t work or support each other alone. When preparing for your career, don’t go it alone. Opportunities for Chapters that you can include in your chapter’s strategic plan are:

• LinkedIn for Student Veterans training
• Indeed for Military resources
• Hiring Our Heroes Career Summits
• Resources and opportunities in SVA’s Career Center
• SVA’s Annual National Conference

Corporate and community mentorship

• All good career plans should include mentorship. A mentor is a trusted and knowledgeable advisor that provides support, guidance, and wisdom and to a mentee. Mentors often times can be the key to success in a job or industry.
• AT SVA HQ, we partner with dozens upon dozens of the world’s largest and most highly sought-after companies to work for. Each of them has made a commitment to the student veteran population to attract, retain, and develop student veteran and military-connected talent.
• In your role as an SVA Chapter Leader, an important and often overlooked way to get membership to start focusing on their professional development is to help normalize help-seeking behavior within the Chapter’s culture. Again, often times “we don’t know what we don’t know” and this is where the relationship and help from a mentor in the job or industry we are looking to break into can help with establishing oneself on their career path. Often times, it is about reaching out, connecting, and learning about what a student can do to get ahead prior to graduation.

Leverage existing partnerships at the National level.

SVA National Headquarters and the programs, services, and support that we receive from our partners not only helps make programs like SVA Summits possible, but SVA Partnerships are formed because these highly sought-after companies want to connect and build a lasting relationship with your SVA Chapter and members. Not only do these organizations want to seek student veteran talent for jobs and internships, but they also want to support the student veteran and SVA Chapter on campus.

In later stages of the SVA Summit, you and your Chapter Leadership team will have the opportunity to meet with and receive guidance and mentorship on your Chapter Strategic Plan by an SVA Partner. Many of these experts in their industry or job field are veterans themselves and many were, at one-time, student veterans or belonged to an SVA Chapter. These individuals are eager to connect with you and learn more about what sort of events and activities that your SVA Chapter has planned, and possibly how they might be able to support it. This will serve as an ideal opportunity to not only inform SVA Partners about what your chapter is doing over the next year but is a perfect opportunity to start building a working relationship with an organization that can support your chapter’s events and help support your Chapter Members as mentors and advisors, which will be an invaluable asset of support to the strength of your Chapter network.

As you are planning professional development events, workshops, and other activities within your Strategic Plan (which remember that this plan is a roadmap for what the chapter is going to be doing) ask about which corporate or community partners might recruit from your school or might have an office or presence close by. Also consider which potential partners or supporters have an existing “Veteran Employee Resource or Affinity Group”, which essentially is a peer-support group for employees of an organization that share an affinity to the military or veteran community…which sounds a bit like an SVA Chapter and is an ideal place to start for finding mentors, advisors, and employers your Chapter and your membership. 

Remember to track success and progress, just like any other mission in the military. 

• Set clear, measurable goals
• Keeping notes on your conversations
• Track progress and lessons learned
• Realign expectations as you progress
• “Fail moving forward”

Create a “Career Services Liaison” for your SVA Chapter

Throughout the SVA Summit, you have learned extensively about how to create a Chapter Strategic Plan and what kinds of resources or types of support there are to help your SVA Chapter succeed. Here are some helpful goals or things to consider with regard to career readiness and professional development programming for your SVA Chapter:

1. Create a chapter training schedule of your events and what things you would like taught to your members.
2. Conduct at least (1) chapter career or professional focused event each semester.
3. Connect with the College/University Career Services center and Alumni Association.
4. Partner with campus and community clubs, organizations, companies, or societies with a focus on professional development or have a connection to the greater community.

As you begin the process of creating and expanding your Chapter Strategic Plan, we encourage you and your SVA Chapter to consider adding a “Career Services Liaison” to your ranks. The Career Services Liaison is responsible for all aspects of career readiness and professional development for the SVA Chapter and its members and serves as a link between membership and the career services office on campus. The focus of SVA’s Career Services Liaison program is to learn about and create cultural competencies related to improving access for student veterans using your campus’ Career Services and to “normalize help seeking behavior” as a way of getting student veterans and military-connected students to think about and start building their careers earlier in college.

Each individual Career Services Liaison will act as a link to SVA National Headquarters and our growing network of Career Services Liaisons and partners seeking student veteran talent. Each Career Services Liaison will also receive specialized, role-specific training, resources, and guidance later on in the SVA Summit.

Learn more about Career Services Liaisons