Monday, October 31, 2011

Veterans Opportunity to Work Act of 2011


Veterans' Job Training Bill Passes in House

The House of Representatives passed legislation Wednesday to provide occupational training to out-of-work veterans as a way to counter growing unemployment in their ranks. The measure passed, 418-6, under suspension of the rules, an expedited procedure requiring a two-thirds majority for passage.

The legislation, HR 2433, the Veterans Opportunity to Work Act of 2011, would allow 100,000 unemployed veterans ages 35 through 64 to apply for Montgomery GI Bill (PL 78-346) benefits. Eligible veterans could choose to enhance their skills with up to a year of training for high-demand fields such as information technology and health care. The bill, sponsored by Florida Republican Jeff Miller, Chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, would require participating veterans to submit a monthly certification of enrollment in a specific course. The assistance each month would be equal to the basic educational benefits provided under the Montgomery GI Bill - a maximum of $1,426 a month for 2011. Payments would be made from the Veterans Affairs (VA) Department's readjustment benefits account.

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Trainer Position Opening - Denver CO

NVTI TRAINER POSITION OPENING

Are you interested in becoming a trainer with NVTI? If so, here is your opportunity to go for it!

The University of Colorado Denver is seeking a highly skilled trainer/facilitator for a position in the National Learning Center/National Veterans' Training Institute (NLC/NVTI) within the university's Academic Technology and Extended Learning unit (ATEL).

As a premier training provider our mission is to provide high, quality training to our customers enabling and assisting them as they deliver employment and transition services. Our customers include the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Corrections, U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs and various state government agencies.

Applications will ONLY be accepted online at the Jobs at CU site http:// www.jobsatcu.com. Refer to job posting number 815213.


To see the complete job listing, requirements, qualifications and application process, go to:
https://www.jobsatcu.com/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp

Application deadline is November 10, 2011.


This position is located in Denver Colorado and is working at the University of Colorado/Denver. One of their missions is to train all veterans representatives throughout the US. Having been through most of their training classes, I can tell you it is an outstanding training facility and the staff were fantastic. If you are interested, use the websites provided and apply.

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Monday, October 24, 2011

Finding Jobs for Wounded Vets

Finding Jobs for Wounded Vets

Military.com
We all know about the challenges facing veterans looking for jobs: an unemployment higher than the national average, and that's not even taking into account the challenges faced by wounded veterans who are in the civilian job market. One of the initiatives that aims to help wounded vets is the Network of Champions, a project formed in 2008 by defense contractor Northrop Grumman to help wounded soldiers return to civilian life.

More than 70 employers, including Capital One, Northrop Grumman and General Motors, are part of the network, which is dedicated to hiring vets suffering from injuries or illnesses incurred while deployed in Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom. Essentially, if you apply for a job with any company in this network, if the company does not have a job that fits your skills, they will circulate your resume (with your permission) to other companies within the network.

The companies that belong to the Network of Champions include:

• Able Forces
Aerotek, Inc
Bank of America
Best Buy
Boeing
Capital One Bank
• Colonial Circuits
Cubic

Deloitte & Touche

• Federal Staffing Resources
General Electric
General Motors
Helmets to Hardhats
Homeland Security Careers
Homeland Security Management Institute, Long Island University

HRworks

Kelly Connect
Lockheed Martin Corporation
National Glass Association
NAVAIR
NAVSEA
Nielsen Associates
Pinkerton Government Services
PINNACLE Solutions
• Quantum Executive Group
Raytheon

Silverstar Consulting Inc
Smart Solutions

SunTrust Bank

TASC
• Team River Runners
TELEDYNE

The Sierra Group
Travelers Insurance Company
US Naval Sailing Association (USNSA)
• US Naval Sailing Foundation (USNSF)
For more information on the Network of Champions, see the Northrop Grumman website

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Wal Mart Job Opportunities


Navy veteran Bill Simon says retail giant is adding stores, jobs and opportunities for those who have served in uniform.
September 01, 2011 11:07 AM Eastern Daylight Time
MINNEAPOLIS- Walmart U.S. President and CEO Bill Simon, who spent 25 years in the U.S. Navy, says he will never forget what the “salty old sea captain” of his first destroyer told him when he reported for duty at the age of 22. “He sat me down. He looked me in the eye. He said, ‘I want you to know I trust you, that your country is counting on you, and that while we might make mistakes, we’re all in this together.’ Then he said, ‘Get out there and do your job.’”
“We’re not waiting on government, businesses, or anyone else”

Simon called those words “one of the most enduring gifts I got from my service. The confidence we gained in ourselves, the ability to do things we never thought imaginable, and what we can do together, is what America needs today. It’s what we need to bottle and deliver to our country.”

Now responsible for more than 3,700 Walmart stores and 1.3 million employees across the United States, Simon urged thousands of veterans gathered Wednesday for the 93rd National Convention of The American Legion in Minneapolis to help lead an “American Renewal” that can spring from the talents and capabilities of the newest generation of veterans.“We love to hire veterans,” he said. “Veterans not only have a record of performance under pressure, but they are educated and technologically savvy, quick learners, and team players.”

Simon said the corporation is using a dedicated website – www.careerswithamission.com – to attract veteran applicants and hire them. Among its features, the site provides searchable job listings as well as guidance about how to convert military experience into fulfilling careers. He added that whenever the spouse of servicemember has to leave a Walmart job due to a military transfer, the spouse is offered another Walmart job in the new location.

“Today, after 10 years of war, there’s a new group of American men and women coming home, ready to lead us in the next American renewal,” Simon told the
Legionnaires. “I’ve got to tell you about this generation. They are incredible. When I signed up to serve, we knew combat was a possibility. For this generation, it’s a probability. Two, three, four deployments, and still they answer the call of duty. They are why I am confident everything is going to be OK.”

He said it is up to the nation at home “to create conditions for their success, so that when they come home, they can lead us to a better day. With respect to jobs, now is not a time to retreat or wait. Now is the time to tackle our problems head-on. “I am proud of the jobs we have at Walmart,” he added. “Inside our stores every day, the American dream comes to life. Last year, we promoted more than 140,000 hourly associates, which is like giving all of Dayton, Ohio, a promotion.
“We’re not waiting on government, businesses, or anyone else,” Simon said. “Frankly, if your business plan involves waiting for somebody else, I wish you all the best.”
There are some things the government could do to “put the wind at our backs,” Simon explained. “First and foremost, we can start by taking care of our veterans when they come home. It’s our moral obligation, yes, but they have so much to offer our country. We need to promote American exports because more exports mean more jobs; there’s a couple of free-trade agreements that are ready to go. Let’s pass them and get on with it. Third, we need a comprehensive reform of our corporate tax code to broaden the tax base and lower the overall tax rate. This will unleash America’s job creators.”

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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Disabled Veterans Wish Foundation Event - November 5


Veterans Day Weekend Celebration
Disabled Veterans Wish Foundation of Indiana
Proudly Presents
Rock and Roll Veteran’s Salute


Where: Monroe County 4H Fairgrounds
When: November 5, 2011 I beam from Twin Towers in New York will be on display
Time: 9:00 am to 1:00 am

Bands schedule to appear are: Kings Cave, Anguish Riders, GF Stella, Blind Rebel,Hype War Machine, and Limited Slip.

Silent Auction: Items: Harley Davidson Cooler, Autographs items; Martina McBride picture, Book – Robin Williams, Rick Springfield picture, CD, and book, Jeanie – “I dream of Jeanie” Barbara Eden, Kurt Busch – Picture, Picture and Book – Ted Nugent, License Plate, Picture, Mouse Pad and Autograph Picture – Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, Hat – Larry the Cable Guy, Grease Movie Poster – John Travolta, Nascar Magazine – Jimmy Johnson, Hat – Paul Jr – Orange County Choppers, autograph CD from Joe Diffie, Diamond Rio, Toby Keith, Kris Kristofferson, Nice watercolor drawing from Karsten Mouras and plus more coming in.

Vendors welcome, have space inside building (has sides open but very clean and very suitable, has electric, room for 30 vendors) also have space outside building for vendors.

Registration is on our web site: www.disabledvetwish.org 40 inside & 30 outside.

Corn hole Tournament: 30 dollars per team, each team bring a half of board and their beanbags, 60 percent payback, registration is on our web site.

DVWF/IN sanction fundraiser, all proceeds going to DVWF/IN. A wish does make a difference.

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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Veterans’ unemployment outpaces civilian rate at 24%

Veterans’ unemployment outpaces civilian rate
By Michael A. Fletcher, Published: October 16
CLEVELAND — As soon as Brian Joseph graduated from high school he joined the Army, where he was trained in a series of jobs that seem to exist only in the military.
He was a multi-channel radio operator. Then he worked as a single-channel radio operator. Later, he worked as a psychological operations specialist, tailoring the U.S. war message to residents of Kosovo and, later, Iraq.
But since leaving the Army in 2008, Joseph has found that the rigorous training he gained during 18 years of military service means little to civilian employers.
“When somebody hears about the radio operator gig, they don’t immediately see a civilian application,” he said. “The same for psychological operations. It is really marketing, but they don’t know what it is, and the thing they associate it with is brainwashing.”
Joseph, 43, who has bounced in and out of jobs since returning home, is confronting a problem that is common among job seekers who have left the military in recent years.
Despite the marketing pitch from the armed forces, which promises to prepare soldiers for the working world, recent veterans are more likely to be unemployed than their civilian counterparts.
Veterans who left military service in the past decade have an unemployment rate of 11.7 percent, well above the overall jobless rate of 9.1 percent, according to fresh data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The elevated unemployment rate for new veterans has persisted despite repeated efforts to reduce it.
The latest to attempt it is the White House. In the jobs package President Obama has been promoting across the country is a tax credit of up to $9,600 for each unemployed veteran a company hires.
“If Congress passes this jobs bill, companies will get new tax credits for hiring America’s veterans,” Obama said at a community college in Dallas this month. “Think about it. We ask these men and women to leave their families, disrupt their careers, risk their lives for our nation. The last thing they should have to do is to fight for a job when they come home.”
But employers say such financial incentives for hiring veterans would not address the heart of the problem.
Lionel Batty, vice president of corporate research at GrafTech International, which makes graphite materials integral to products such as smartphone batteries and solar panels, said his firm is moving to hire more veterans, in part by trying to better understand their experiences. But, he said, tax credits have nothing to do with that effort.
“We’ll take them, but we don’t hire people because of tax credits,” he said. “We do what’s right for our business.”
More important than financial incentives for hiring returning veterans is making the skills and experience they earned in the military more understandable for civilian employers, experts say.
“There is not a great deal of knowledge with corporate America on a lot of the skill sets that come from the military,” said Stuart Keeter, a former paratrooper who is a vice president with Alliance International, a recruiting service that specializes in military veterans.
Even as the nation suffers through its longest period of high unemployment in a generation, many employers complain about the difficulty they have finding suitable workers. Some candidates lack the aptitude for certain technical tasks, employers say. Others, they say, are missing the “soft skills” — punctuality, teamwork, the ability to operate independently and take charge of a task.
The paradox for veterans is that those are qualities and skills they possess in abundance. Many employers say they value veterans’ leadership training, discipline and national service. The problem is that employers often have only the vaguest notion of what people learn in the military.
“Hiring veterans is just the right thing to do,” said Thomas G. Tomasula Jr., director of domestic staffing at Lubrizol, a 7,000-employee firm that makes petroleum additives, industrial lubricants and other specialty chemicals. But, he said, translating the military’s defined structure to the civilian world is not easy, which is one reason why Lubrizol has joined a new effort aimed at placing veterans in hard-to-fill manufacturing jobs.
“Clearly, there are some skill sets in the military that can be attractive to what we do,” he said, “but the military is more defined, there’s more black and white. In business, there is more gray. The challenge is to help people be successful in this grayness.”
A Pew Research Center survey released this month found that large majorities of veterans say the military helped them get ahead in life. They say the service builds character, maturity and self-confidence. Yet, 44 percent of veterans who served in the past decade called the transition back to civilian life difficult — nearly double the rate of veterans who served before them.
Veterans receive preference when applying for federal and a wide range of other government jobs. They qualify for government-funded education and job training. Industry groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce host job fairs aimed at veterans. And a host of firms target veterans for jobs they consider hard to fill.
But such programs have not significantly reduced the jobless rate among veterans.
“There are not that many people who have a military background, and they need to go about the process of learning how military skills relate to other jobs,” said Bill Scott, a vice president at Bradley-Morris, a career placement firm that focuses on veterans.
In northeast Ohio, the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network, a business group, is teaming with the Veterans’ Service group of the state Department of Job and Family Services on a project aimed at matching returning veterans with manufacturing jobs.
The idea is to translate veterans’ military job skills into civilian ones and match them with hard-to-fill jobs, such as machinists and technicians.
“There is a gap between what the military has trained people for and what employers need,” said Judith Crocker, director of education and training at MAGNET. “Also, veterans are often not very articulate in describing what they learned and what they had done in the military.”
The effort has attracted 43 manufacturers interested in hiring returning veterans, for jobs that pay as much as $28 an hour. The employers project filling 240 jobs over the next several months.
Kim Smith, marketing manager for the Pipe Line Development Co., a 97-employee firm that is doing a fast-growing business selling pipeline repair parts, said her company is eager to hire veterans.
“They have sacrificed. We know they are very disciplined and they are trainable,” Smith said.
Some veterans complain, however, that such sentiment does not always translate into jobs.
Trenton Marshall, 25, shipped out for the Navy in 2005. He was in Jacksonville, Fla., for most of that time, training and working as an aviation machinist’s mate. “I was a helicopter mechanic,” Marshall said. “I spent two years training and doing aircraft operations, refueling, launching aircraft.”
When he left the Navy and returned to Cleveland in 2009, he struggled to find work. Places such as Walgreens and McDonald’s passed on him, he said.
He did land a job at Wal-Mart, where he said a supervisor announced that he would be paid $7.40 an hour — 15 cents an hour more than usual rate — because of his time in the service. That job did not last long.
Now he is out of work, waiting to start school at Cleveland State University, where he plans to use his veteran’s benefits to train as a physician’s assistant.
“I hit the revolving door,” he said. “In interviews, people are all smiles. ‘Thank you for your service. You did a great deed.’ All of that. But then you’d get a letter saying you are unqualified, and you sit there like ‘say what?’ ”

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Friday, October 14, 2011

The time for Veteran Opportunity to Work Act is NOW

The American Legion supports HR 2433 - The Veteran Opportunity to Work Act

(October 11, 2011) As early as tomorrow, October 12 at 5 p.m., the U.S. House of Representatives will take a very consequential vote; one which may determine if this nation's unemployed veterans, of all eras and ages, can expect increased employment opportunities in the near future courtesy of a grateful nation. A nation which will not stand to see her defenders return home from the battlefield empty handed.

H.R. 2433, the Veterans Opportunity to Work Act, or VOW Act, introduced this summer by Representative Jeff Miller (FL), Chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, is scheduled to be voted on imminently on the House floor.

Congress must and should support this bill.

National Commander Fang A. Wong presented that message during a September hearing in front of a joint session of the House and Senate Veterans' Affairs Committees. Wong presented the Legion's legislative priorities during the hearing, focusing on veterans employment, the Department of Veterans Affairs' claims backlog, and the treatment of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries.

Wong spoke at length about the job crisis facing the country's veterans. A figure of more than 1 million veterans without employment, including 632,000, ages 35-60. Congress should, he said, pass legislation now creating incentives to promote the hiring of veterans to help reduce those figures.

Furthermore, Wong said a key to turning around the unemployment crisis is both a stronger effort by the federal government to hire veterans and an involved private sector. He praised Rep. Jeff Miller, as well as his Senate counterpart, Sen. Patty Murray (WA), Chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, for legislation they've advanced that provide incentives for hiring veterans.

"The American Legion hopes you will collaborate and bring your parties together to get a jobs bill for America's veterans passed," Wong said.
"It is our obligation as a nation to ensure that every single member of the military who chooses to leave the military can effectively transfer his or her education, training and experience into a civilian career field."

With passage of the VOW Act, Congress will take the first step in reaching Commander Wong's goal of helping our nation's unemployed veterans, but we need your help to make sure this bill makes it across the finish line.

Please call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your House member's office. Ask for the staff person following this bill. Identify yourself and tell the aide you request the Representative support H.R. 2433, the VOW Act.

Tell them the VOW Act is the ONLY current piece of veterans' job legislation to specifically address the cohort of 630,000+ veterans aged 35-60. Tell them this bill had strong bipartisan support in Committee and we ask for bipartisan support on the floor. Let them know The American Legion and its members and advocates are counting on their vote! We need to pass this now.

Again, please call 202-224-3121 and support The American Legion and The VOW Act. This is the most important matter facing Congress at this time. The time for VOW is NOW. Call your Congressman TODAY."

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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

EFMP Forum & Resource Fair-Indy - Registration Ends 10-21


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