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In this tough job market, it’s nice to know that some industries are still looking for a few good men and women. In the second part of this two part series, Soldiering On, The World’s Katy Clark reports on how railroads are tapping those leaving the military to expand and diversify their own ranks. (Photo by Katy Clark)
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. Bad news on the unemployment front today. The Labor Department said the jobless rate inched up to 9.9% in April. It’s a tough market for anyone looking for a job right now; that includes service personnel coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. But some companies are actively recruiting in military circles. The World’s Katy Clark has this second look at employment prospects for war vets.
KATY CLARK: When GI Jobs magazine ranked its top military friendly employers this year, railroads scored three of the top four spots. Number two was Jacksonville, Florida based CSX Transportation. CSX operates huge freight trains like this one over a 23 state network. About one in four new hires at CSX is a veteran. Naval reservist Nate Bryant joined the railroad as a temp in 2001. He’s now a procurement manager for CSX.
NATE BRYANT: We have about 90 people in our group and I would say at least 20 of them are veterans. So it’s almost like another brotherhood.
CLARK: Veterans say having other employees around who understand the military makes the move into the civilian work force a lot easier. Bryant says it’s also important that his bosses at CSX understand that when he’s called back to duty it can often be with little notice, like when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
BRYANT: Katrina hit on a Monday. I left on a Wednesday and I was gone for a month and CSX, of course, let me do what I had to do.
CLARK: Long term absences like that can scare many employers off from hiring veterans, but the military and railroads actually have a lot in common. They both operate round the clock and employees often work remotely with minimal supervision, not to mention the skills learned in the military transfer pretty easily. And CSX considers the experience gained in the military worth the risk of an occasional deployment interrupting the work flow.
REBECCA HAMILTON: We look for folks with logistics background, mechanical, engineering, signal, electricians, all those skill crafts are in the military and they’re a great fit for our company.
CLARK: Rebecca Hamilton is the former head of CSX’s Military and Diversity Recruiting team. She’s now a Safety Manager for the company and an Army Reservist. Hamilton says that one of the greatest challenges veterans face when applying for civilian jobs is not knowing how to make their military experience relevant to the person doing the hiring. Take, for instance, someone who called in air strikes in Afghanistan.
HAMILTON: That particular incident, you know there’s a lot of things happening at a time. Not only are you talking about multitasking, you’re talking about safety, you’re talking about being aware of your environment, you’re talking about stress and the fact that you have other people around you that you’re serving with and if everyone doesn’t do their job, then there could be some not so great consequences to that.
CLARK: CSX and the other railroads began aggressively recruiting from the military ranks around 10 years ago. It was part of an industry wide diversity initiative. Until that point, the rail companies had largely been the domain of white males. But after a nearly two decade long hiring freeze, those white men were approaching retirement age.
GARY SEASE: And we got to a point where we looked at our demographics and it was frightening.
CLARK: Gary Sease is Director of Corporate Communications at CSX. He says the company considered a number of different recruiting initiatives. In the end, though, the military seemed the best place to focus their efforts. Sease doesn’t see that changing any time soon.
SEASE: For all the reasons that we’ve talked about, the characteristics that military veterans bring to the work force, the diversity they represent, our own great need for people coming into the railroad industry and to CSX in particular, so it will always be a clear focus for us.
CLARK: Good news for the roughly 200,000 men and women who leave the military each year. Dan Fritchman was getting out of the Navy in 2008, just as the economy began its downward spiral. He’d spent eight years working with nuclear submarines. Fritchman says he’d never thought much about working for a railroad company before landing his current job in CSX’s finance department, but he’s enjoying the work. Fritchman says men and women leaving the military for civilian life have a lot of challenges ahead of them, but finding a job shouldn’t be any more stressful than anything else if they know how to market their strengths.
DAN FRITCHMAN: First of all, a very strong work ethic. You know that when you tell the military person to do something, that they’re going to take that onboard and they’re going to do it to the best of their ability and get it done as quickly as possible. That’s just something that we’re taught. At the Naval Academy if someone asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, it’s not I don’t know, it’s I’ll find out sir or ma’am.
CLARK: That kind of initiative would seem to play well in lots of industries. The railroads may simply have caught on sooner than the rest. For The World, this is Katy Clark, Jacksonville, Florida.
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