Chances are excellent your veteran clients are better trained and educated than their civilian counterparts with a similar number of years in the workforce.

Unlike most private sector industries, education and training is in the DNA of every defense organization. Ninety five percent of hiring officials know almost nothing about how that element of active duty service can work for their companies. That’s because ninety-five percent of Americans have never served on active duty.

Most people associate training to being in uniform. Because it involves mastering specific skills to complete discrete tasks, and since many of those tasks involve warfighting, most military training doesn’t transfer to the civilian world. 

Military professional education (your veteran clients may call it by its acronym: “PME”) is mandatory. It progresses from the basics to the very advanced. Leadership is the theme that runs through every course. That’s because the military is the only culture that promotes primarily based on how well its members can lead. Your civilian clients can claim to be leaders; your veteran clients can prove it, partially by the schools they attended.

Here are questions you can ask your veteran clients that will set them apart when it comes to education:

• Did you attend in residence or in non-residence?

Most professional military schools award a master’s degree. The courses are usually ten months or less, similar to executive masters’ programs in the civilian world.

Nearly all schools offer their courses remotely and in residence. Because every active duty member must complete the course, it’s not feasible for all to attend in residence. The Services convene selection boards to decide who will go in person. That is very competitive. For example, most of the intermediate and advanced schools select only the top four or five percent of all eligibles to attend in person.

If your veteran client attended in residence, ask them to estimate the selection rate. Most can. Those that can’t, should find an approximate answer on line or with a quick phone call. 

Capture the investment the service made in every member who attends in residence. First, they paid them to move, with their families, from their bases to the school house and later from the school house to their next assignment. The learners’ pay and benefits continued, even though they were full-time students, usually for ten months. 

The average tuition for a master’s degree is about $65,000—and that doesn’t include books and other fees. Depending upon your veteran’s rank, their Service could easily have invested nearly $200,000 in their education. 

Was your client a distinguished graduate? That honor is truly rare. Ask your client for an estimate as to what it took to make DG (distinguished graduate).

Be certain you show all that impact in your veterans’ résumés. You may even want to show it as an assignment:

If they attended in residence, consider showing that like this:

• Full time student, Master of Military Operational Art and Science, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB AL May 23 to Mar 24

Selected by senior leadership to be in the top four percent of 5,000 eligibles to attend this in-residence executive master’s program under a full scholarship. One of only 12 from a class of 650 to be a Distinguished Graduate.”

But there is still more impact you can mine. Afterall, every new hire must be a problem solver. Hiring officials don’t care if that person was paid to solve problems or not. So every test, every essay, every case study, every simulation your student completed—whether in residence or not—is a problem solved. Be sure you document the problem and any feedback from the faculty. Did they award your veteran the highest grade? Did they offer comments beyond some letter grade or numeric score?

A veteran’s diploma is almost a guarantee. The only way your veterans could have graduated was because the staff and faculty said they had mastered the material. And the faculty are often subject matter experts themselves, very often with a terminal degree.

Consider these success stories from the education section of one of my client’s résumés: 

“Results: Sparkplug behind our team getting top grades in a comprehensive simulation of building an organization from scratch. Won the trust of two established experts to gain insight into every aspect of daily operations. Exceeded expectations by building their mission statement in exchange for their help. Fielded tough questions from an experienced professor and senior executive.

Results: Delivered a comprehensive investment analysis of a major organization in half the allotted time. Dug deep to find all the right data. Then translated them into information decision makers could use easily. One of relatively few teams to get an ‘A’ for this assignment.”

Use what you have learned to get the value of their education to the hiring officials. Your clients’ school work didn’t just get them credentials. What your veteran clients learned frees hiring companies of training costs. Here’s an exceptional example. Every active duty member is trained to counter sexual harassment, violence, discrimination, dangerous drugs, and suicide in the work place—every single year. In addition, they were instructed in diversity, equity, and inclusion decades before those became buzzwords.

Let’s allow other “career professionals” to just fill in the blanks when it comes to education. They mindlessly drop in clichéd information about degrees in résumés they write. Sadly, they limit the career success of the very clients they have pledged to support.

I hope this article helps you teach your veteran clients the value of their education.