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How Can I Turn My Infantry Experience into a Civilian Career with Career Training?

    

The skills you gained in the infantry can be used with career training to boost your resume

After proudly serving your country, you want the transition to civilian life to be just as rewarding. You want a good job that lets you provide for your family and offers you a path to bigger things. For some, this transition is easy; others have more obstacles to clear before they are able to settle into a career.

So why is the transition so much easier for some? Well, it could be a combination of factors:

If you served in the infantry, the last bullet point may seem like a tough challenge to overcome at first. After all, how do you market the skills that made you good at your job in the military and show how they can help a company?

That is where the right career training program can help. The right career training program will help you develop new skills that hiring managers are looking for. At the same time, they will help you leverage the skills and experience you gained in the infantry so you can stand out from the rest of the pack.

Here's how Anthony Voce used career training to transition to a civilian  career. >>

Finding the Right Career After Infantry Service

Military personnel who work in logistics, supply chain, communications, medical, and other areas gain a great deal of hands-on experience during their time in the service. The infantry, however, builds a certain skill set that sets people apart. Those who serve in the infantry develop skills such as:

  • Leadership
  • Problem-solving
  • Teamwork
  • Communication
  • Confidence
  • Initiative

The key is to leverage those skills in the civilian world. With so many career training opportunities available to you as a veteran, you will be able to combine your experience with the knowledge you pick up from a career training program to move into a number of high-paying IT jobs.

Cybersecurity

The cyberthreat landscape that businesses face is constantly changing. New malware and zero-day threats are found every day. It takes a person with a certain knack for tactical thinking to excel in cybersecurity, a field where you will have the opportunity to:

  • Harden networks and systems against cyberthreats
  • Hunt down threats that pose a risk to your company’s network
  • Train others on how to recognize and respond to cyberattacks
  • Examine logs, files, and emails for things that don’t look right and could signal a breach

Your time in the infantry helped instill the right mentality for a job in cybersecurity. The right career training, such as CompTIA Security+ or CyberSec First Responder courses, will provide you with the foundational skills you need to start a career in cybersecurity that you can build on.

Network Administration

The job of a network administrator is to maintain an organization’s computer network and troubleshoot any problems that may arise. This means the network admin is responsible for tasks such as:

  • Planning networks for scalability
  • Installing and configuring hardware and software
  • Making sure systems are properly integrated with one another
  • Budgeting for and purchasing hardware, software, and services
  • Monitoring performance and maintaining uptime of the network and connected resources

Life in the infantry prepared you for this type of work because it taught you to think proactively. A good network administrator thinks about how their network will grow even when it is small. They look for weak points that need fortification, and they plan before they act. Just like you learned in the infantry, preparation is the key to success.

You can supplement your military experience with new technical skills by taking CompTIA Network+, Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT), or Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) courses.

Database Administration

According to Statista, 1.61 zettabytes, or 1.61 billion terabytes, of data traffic flowed from data centers to users around the globe in 2018. Companies need people they can count on to build the databases and dashboards that store, analyze, and display all of that data.

In order to succeed as a database administrator, you need to be the type of person that pays attention to details. When dealing with data, there is no room for error. Errors can result in duplicate data, missing data, or even corrupted data, any of which has the ability to render a data set useless.

Database administrators also need to constantly think about security. Many network breaches target financial data, customer data, personal data, and just about any other type of data.

A desire to protect and defend is a must-have for the modern-day database admin. And combining that mindset, which you developed in the military, with the knowledge you gain in a Microsoft Azure Data Engineer Associate course, for example, can put you on the path toward a successful career as a database administrator.

Systems Administration

IT systems are complex. A modern-day network contains many different hardware, security, and software solutions that need to interact with one another. The role of the systems administrator is to ensure all parts work as a unit so the business can run efficiently.

A good systems administrator has the ability to see the big picture when it comes to their network. They look for potential problems that may arise due to integrations or security risks and address them before the network or any connected solutions go down.

Microsoft Azure Administrator or Fundamentals of AWS courses can set you up with the foundational skills you need to start a career in this field.

What Challenges Can a Veteran Expect When Entering the Civilian Job Market?

Transitioning from the infantry to the civilian world of employment has its challenges.

To start, you have to showcase how your unique experience has prepared you for life in the business world.

The more technical jobs in the military give service members the chance to list experience, projects, and skills that can directly fulfill a hiring manager’s requirements for a job. If you served in the infantry, however, this isn’t always the case. You have to make a greater effort to show how your experience would benefit a company.

This is where the right career training would benefit you most. When coupled with the skills the infantry instilled in you, learning the necessary technical skills from hands-on projects gives you the opportunity to build a resume that really stands out.

What Resources Can Help You with Career Training?

Career training may seem like the next logical step to take as you transition into the civilian workplace. Veteran education benefits can open the door to further opportunities for those who served in the military. Your service may entitle you to receive money to cover some, or even all, of your tuition for a career training program.

If you are unsure about what type of career training is right for you, or how to get started, you can talk to a New Horizons Career Development Solutions counselor. The team here can provide you with guidance on topics ranging from career trends to certification programs and help you leverage your military experience to find the most rewarding career possible.

Looking to Transition to a Civilian Career? Read This Veteran's Story

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