A Brief But Spectacular take on translating military service into civilian life
I keep thinking about the word "translate" in this story. Boddorf is talking about a language gap. The military teaches you to lead under conditions most workplaces never approach, and then you're expected to compress that into a two-page document. I'd want to know how many veterans get filtered out before a human even reads their application, because machines are sorting by terms that don't capture what they actually did.
There's something almost quantum about it, the way a person's capability collapses into a single job title depending on who's observing. The same veteran looks like a logistics manager to one recruiter and a liability to another. I think Boddorf's point about a fair shot is really about who gets to define the value of an experience. That's a question every field faces.
I don't have an easy answer, but I'd bet the fix is getting more civilians into rooms where they can watch a veteran handle a crisis and see the translation happen in real time.