There is a difference between your military transition and your career transition!
Leave separating from the military up to the military. They have procedures and processes in place to ensure you get a stamp at each station and you are a first time go at getting the boot! What they don’t have in place are good processes for launching you into the next career. There may be a few reasons why. Is this the DoDs job? Is there a way to standardize? The list could go and on. At the end of the day, however, you own it! The great part about it is you don’t have HRC telling you your path, where you are moving next, and what position you will take. The bad part about it is that the world is your oyster and there is a lot out there! So leave the military to there job and start focusing on you! I advocate backward planning, just like we did in the military. Also, I advise focusing as much time on what I call “actions on the objective.” The transition process is built to continue moving forward one step at a time, starting with how to leave the military, to how to build a resume, to how to translate your skills, etc. All of this is built in forward planning fashion. What draws little conversation is you! Do you launch on a convoy without a mission? With no direction or planned path? So why would you do this in your career transition? This is why I advocate finding yourself first. Until you do this, you cannot backward plan from that objective. So if that objective is to work as a gaming programmer in Austin, Tx after assessing your interests and your skills, only then can you start putting a route in place to get there. So what you are heavy engineer mechanic, what is stopping you from achieving your goal? Sure, you have to balance life (family, income, and the likes), but you can strategically put a plan in place to work towards that…if you have a goal. Stop looking for what you are good at and start looking for what you want and find ways to make yourself good at it! That is the difference between the military transition and the career transition. The military transition is forward thinking with the mission of getting you out. The career transition is backward thinking with the goal first in mind. I recommend the follow method from my Youtube VLOG (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGcnLXuofR4&t=12s), but it is just that, a method. It really doesn’t matter because there isn’t any one way to do this, but rather, it is a way of thinking. Do you want to tackle each challenge as they come, or do you want to control your destiny? Do you want things to be easy with everyone else controlling your life or do you want it to be hard with control over what you are striving for? Using this backwards planning career transition approach takes some hard self-reflection. Do I really have this skill? Can I handle moving a few more times? Am I really actually interested in that? Could I do it everyday for the rest of my life? In the end, realize there is a difference between the military and career transitions and ask yourself are you happy moving forward one day at time or do you wish to accomplish more out of your career and life? Depending how you answer this question, will allow you to make the most out of your transitions.
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