What do companies like Johnson & Johnson, Prudential and Bank of America have in common? They are all so dedicated to hiring and retaining veteran talent that they're part of an upcoming summit to help small and medium-sized companies develop military affairs programs.
It's part of a summit from America's Warrior Partnership (AWP) and JPMorgan Chase called the Corporate Veteran Initiative (CVI) Workshop. The CVI Workshop will kick off AWP's eighth annual Warrior Community Integration Symposium, a three-day virtual event that includes guest speakers, roundtable discussions and panels of guests on a range of topics from veteran reintegration to suicide prevention.
The CVI Workshop is for smaller companies to take lessons from large corporations to learn the best practices developed by their military affairs offices. The goal of these military affairs programs within a company is to increase veteran employee retention and recruitment, because the companies involved appreciate what vets bring to their organizations.
A recent study from the Rand Corporation finds that veterans in civilian organizations not only bring their technical skills and experience to the job, but also a number of other desirable soft skills that may be hard to find in civilian employees of a comparable age. These include leadership, decision-making, dependability and attention to detail, just to name a few.
But veterans also need an environment where those skills can be applied and challenged. They need room to grow, the opportunity to use those skills and a place where they feel their contribution to the organizational "mission" is necessary and where they are working toward attainable, challenging goals as a community, either among other vets or with a new civilian "unit."
That's where a military affairs office comes in. These offices within civilian employers create and foster those environments, provide a sense of community among veterans within an organization and more.
Corporations like USAA, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, an investment banking company, are always looking for ways to improve their military affairs programs. Symposia like the America's Warrior Partnership's CVI provide an opportunity for departments within those companies to share ideas, best practices and success stories while helping smaller businesses develop similar programs to create their own -- so they can benefit from the same kind of veteran talent.
AWP's eighth annual Warrior Community Integration Symposium is set to begin on Oct. 25, 2021, and run through Oct. 27. The Corporate Veteran Initiative Workshop is the first event and will be held from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. ET on Oct. 25.
Registration for the event is free. To learn more about AWP's Warrior Community Integration Symposium or to register for the event (even if you just want to sit in on the Corporate Veteran Initiative Workshop), visit the symposium page on the AWP website.
-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.
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