8 Reasons A Veteran Engineer Needs To Be Your Next Hire

As the United States pays respect to its military veterans, I’d like to share with engineering company senior leaders and human resource professionals, some perspectives on why a veteran engineer needs to be your next hire.  Although a veteran myself, I didn’t want to rely solely on my perceptions of what marks an engineer with military experience “different” than their non-military background counterparts.  So I canvassed my network of veteran engineers to solicit insight and commentary on the following three questions:

1. What are the top three tangible skills a military engineer has that is typically lacking with their non-military sector equivalents?

2. What are the top three intangible skills a military engineer has that is typically lacking with their non-military sector equivalents?

3. What is the one skill you developed in the military that has helped to bring the most value to the organization you work in now?

The main takeaway from the responses I received is this:  if you seek a high-performance engineer who can lead, follow, communicate, empathize, and be relied on to accomplish challenging projects; then a veteran engineer should be your next hire.

“While veteran engineers aren't always plug and play on the private sector technical side their other tangible skills and proven intangibles more than offset the gaps. Most private sector managers will tell you that the return on investment of hiring a veteran engineer shows itself very quickly. They are the perfect people to tackle special initiatives, exhibit their core values and move the organization forward as a whole.” - Retired Air Force Civil Engineer

Skills of The Military Engineer

So what are the key attributes a veteran military engineer brings to an organization?  Let’s focus on the top eight in terms of the benefits to clients, the organization’s employees, stakeholders, and the teams in which the engineer will operate.

Leadership.  This is one of the most important skills an engineer must have, and must continue to develop, to move forward in their career.  It also happens to be an attribute that engineering company CEO’s seek in their staff  and each design team desires in their engineer manager.  

It comes as little surprise that the military provides ample opportunity for leadership skills development for its engineers.  Military engineers build their leadership day-by-day through  experiences leading projects, serving on a headquarters staff, or leading men and women at either fixed installations or in deployed locations around the world.  They learn what effective leadership looks and feels like because it’s full-contact, 360-degree leadership engagement from the moment they enter their commissioning or basic-training source until the end of their service commitment.  

Veteran engineers bring direct application experience of leadership to any organization.  They often are experienced in handling crisis situations, where immediate decisions must be made and calm must be maintained amidst chaos.  They are also trained in leadership fundamentals, but more importantly, have applied the training in real life situations and have the experience of both success and failure to help guide your company.

Followership.  I consider followership as important, and in some situations more important, than leadership.  In fact, leadership is only half the story.  

Engineers who served in the military understand the importance, and necessity, of hierarchy, as well as the need for each person on a team to have their own role, responsibilities and authorities. This is because for any organization to be effective in accomplishing its mission and delivering intended benefits there must be a blend of leader and follower in each team member.

By 2020, it’s estimated that over 80% of professionals across all industries will work in teams and that number, I’ll wager, is likely closer 100% for engineers. A team is not comprised of solely leaders or followers. In fact, the most effective teams operating either on a basketball court, in an emergency room, or in a design charrette are comprised of members who move seamlessly from leader to follower back to leader as the ebb and flow of the teams work progresses.

If you want to learn more about followership as a skill to be developed for engineering career success, I recommend visiting the works of Marc and Samantha Hurwitz.  Their Generative Partnership Model, based on five guiding principles bounded on either side by a corresponding followership or a leadership skill, superbly captures the skills set the majority of veteran engineers hold in varying degrees.

Mentoring and Coaching.  Veteran engineers by-and-large enter the civilian workforce with enhanced mentoring and coaching skills.  I didn’t fully grasp the importance of these twin skills until nearly my own retirement and transition.  I now view them as essential for any person to ascend to senior leadership position and be effective in that role.  

Mentoring is relationship oriented. It seeks to provide a safe environment where the mentee shares whatever issues affect his or her professional and personal success.  

Coaching is task oriented. The focus is on concrete issues, such as managing more effectively, speaking more articulately, and learning how to think strategically.

Why are these important skills to have in your engineers?  Because you will have younger engineers who need guidance, support, and direction.  A mentor and coach comes equipped with the empathy and directness needed to help others move forward.  

At a time when more than 50% of employees are dissatisfied in their work, having engineers on the team who can mentor and coach others towards a common goal is worth it’s weight in gold.

Communicating.  Next to leadership comes communications in terms of the relative level of  importance professionals place on the skill.  Veteran engineers are equally accustomed to presenting and communicating complex matters in concise format in order to influence decision makers to a decision.  The more time a veteran served active duty, the more likely it is that he or she served one or more  tours on a headquarters staff, where nearly all they did was communicate ideas and influence decisions.

Although it’s generally accepted that engineers are operating at a disadvantage in communications abilities, I don’t see this to be the case for engineers that served in the military.  Imagine having an engineer on your staff armed with the skills to take complex ideas and turn them into clear, concise, and hard-hitting points that resonate with clients or senior leaders in your organization.

Teambuilding.   The military is built on small teams, be it a squad, a flight or even a project team.  It’s no different in your organization, which operates at the small-unit level of project teams.  Veteran engineers know how to operate effectively in a team and know how to effectively lead a team.  

From my first week on active duty until my last week on active duty, I was part of a team.  Often times I was a part of several teams simultaneously.  Beyond the on-the-job training of simply being in a team, most military engineers will have received some level of formal training on team building.  They’ll understand that to be effective, every team must move through the four stages of team development:  forming, norming, storming and performing.  They’ll also understand the importance that collaboration, coordination and communication plays in making a team high-performing.  Every engineering organization can benefit from team builders, but you can’t find team builders everywhere.  Veteran engineers are a good place to start.

Planning.  From five-paragraph operations orders to contract requests for proposals to deployment planning and high-level strategy, veteran engineers know how to develop effective plans.  Even military engineers who may have served a four-year service commitment will have been exposed to opportunities to plan something.  

The skill set required to make effective and flexible plans takes time and experience.  It’s an often used cliche that “no plan lasts first contact with the enemy”.  But it’s true, and military engineers know this and know how to plan for contingencies.  To illustrate, I share this comment from one of the survey respondents:

“Two of the skills I developed while serving in the military that has helped to bring the most value to the organization I work in today, are planning and collaboration: identifying the needs of the organization and planning how to meet those needs while working within the organization to support improvements and efficiencies. Being accessible and demonstrating a desire to understand people and their opinions/position prior to making a decision.”

Core Values.  Business and relationships are built on trust.  The engineering work we undertake is based on a commitment to protect the public’s safety.  Veteran engineers understand clearly the importance of trust, integrity, service, and a commitment to excellence because, while they served in the Armed Forces, most were in situations where lives or large amounts of resources depended on their integrity.  Veterans do not hold a monopoly on trust and integrity, but they do have a special understanding of the importance that core values play in an organization’s effectiveness.  In most cases, engineering company CEOs and HR professionals will find veteran engineers to be a less self-centered and a stronger teammate, who is generally disinterested in self-promotion and more interested in organizational success.  If this sounds interesting, seek out a veteran engineer to fill your next vacancy.

Perseverance. Not every project or situation flows as planned and sometimes, they can become downright nasty.  Few of the military engineers I know, who served more than five years, left the service without at least one story of true perseverance.  This is where they had to dig deep to find the inner fortitude to work through a hard situation.  Maybe it was being deployed from their family for nine months, shortly after their son was born, or being assigned to Greenland for a year away from their family, or having helped a grieving unit after one of their members was killed in Afghanistan.  

Hard situations come in many varieties and I’ve found that seldom are the ones associated with projects the hardest.  It’s the situations where raw human emotion comes into play.  A comrade injured, or the long separation from loved ones, or the fear that rises when leaving a secured compound.  Veteran engineers across America know perseverance and how to dig deep when others rely on them.

Engineers Lead The Way!

The skills needed by engineers to be effective in your engineering company today, extend beyond those taught in an engineering school.  So imagine being able to find an engineer that’s already uploaded with the raw skill, but just needs the guidance to mold what they already know to a new environment.  You stand a strong chance of finding that engineer in a veteran.

“Please don't allow our short haircuts, acronyms, and aggressiveness intimidate you: we want to fit in and help the team succeed. We're indoctrinated into a system of accountability, trust, integrity, and loyalty.” - Retired Military Engineer

Christian Knutson, P.E., PMP is a veteran Air Force civil engineer officer and now serves as a executive leadership and strategy coach working with engineers and engineering organizations to integrate leadership and strategy into everything they do, in order to generate excellence and high performance.  His works are found here, as well as at the The Engineering Career Coach and General Leadership.