Veterans: NDTA Corporate Members Want You!

By Sharon Lo Managing Editor, Defense Transportation Journal and The Source

Transitioning from active duty to a civilian career is an important—and often challenging—time for service members. From hanging up your uniform to writing a civilian resume to negotiating your new salary, the differences experienced between the two worlds are numerous.

The Department of Veterans Affairs reports nearly 200,000 men and women make this transition each year. According to a survey conducted by VetAdvisor®, 68 percent of veterans surveyed cited the inability to find opportunities matching their military experience as the biggest obstacle in obtaining employment.

How can one overcome this obstacle? Look no further than NDTA’s roster of corporate members. In many instances, you will find obvious parallels between the skills and knowledge gained through military experience and the positions available in these companies.

In addition to understanding the value military members bring, many companies are actively recruiting service members. NDTA corporate members AAR CORP., Amtrak, Atlas Air Worldwide, Enterprise Holdings, FedEx, and National Air Cargo specifically mention veteran recruiting efforts on their websites. However, these are far from the only companies actively recruiting service members. The knowledge, skills, and abilities veterans gained through military service would translate well into a career at any one of NDTA’s member companies.

Make use of your NDTA community. Check out the association’s website for opportunities to network with these and other employers at events and national meetings, and connect with them online through NDTA’s social media. Remember, with labor shortages in trucking, aviation, warehousing, hospitality, and several other segments of the transportation and logistics industries—both sides are looking to connect.

For additional assistance transitioning to civilian life, visit Military OneSource and take a look at Military Times’ Veterans Transition Survival Guide.

Transitioning from a career in the military to the civilian world can be daunting, but utilizing the connections and resources available to you can help to ensure your success.

As NDTA celebrates and reflects on the past 75 years, it’s important to also consider what the future will bring for the organization and its members. To that end, we have asked several members and friends of the association to tell us, “what do you think the next 75 years will be like for NDTA?”

 

John Fasching
Senior Consultant, Maintenance, Distribution and Operational Logistics Group, LMI

The advances that future NDTA members might help usher in to the Defense Transportation System will allow American to help maintain a degree of capability overmatch and a deterrent effect on future near-peer adversaries. I believe that we are at an inflection point in our dominant history of military force projection capability and capacity. Adversaries have been strategizing, developing and fielding their own anti-access/area-denial and global reach capabilities. They seek to exploit our process vulnerabilities, disrupt force deployments early-on and continuously compress our rapid response timelines. We may be training the next greatest generation of transportation professionals who will transform our current, methodical and predictable Joint deployment process into a strategic maneuver process – rapidly delivering in-tact, Joint combined arms maneuver formations conducting contested, cross-domain operations en route, and arriving in immediately employable configuration in accordance with combatant commanders’ scheme of maneuver. NDTA members form the catalyst for the legal, policy and cultural changes required to realize scalable, combat loaded strategic maneuver capability where, as an example, Army formations can fight their way to the fight(s) and dynamically reconfigure en route as necessary depending on operational risks anticipated at chokepoints along the way, providing cross-domain kinetic and non-kinetic effects while maneuvering through the strategic support area and into theaters of operations. We will evolve from breaking combat power into its components, shipping the components separately through benign operating environments and embarking on a lengthy, target-rich reception, staging, onward movement and integration process to rebuild and employ combat power in theater. In the next 75 years, NDTA members will create, operate, and optimize out-of-this-world supply chains as space-based resources are increasingly tapped as enablers for military operations. We will help transition Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, Multinational and Commercial force projection operations from largely human-in-the-loop, carbon-fuel-driven and strategically predictable endeavors, to artificial intelligence-enabled, multi-power sourced and multi-domain resilient operations. Our members will boldly and audaciously lead and inspire the change needed to create and maintain windows of force projection overmatch to underpin our near-, mid- and far-term national security interests against increasingly astute and dynamic adversaries.

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