With Troop Drawdown, IT Looks To Hire More Vets

Lucas123 writes "The military's a great place to learn how to kill people and break things, but many also consider it one of the best training grounds for high-tech skills. 'If you're working on a ship or a plane or tank, you've got responsibility for large, complex, extremely expensive equipment run by highly sophisticated IT platforms and software,' said Mike Brown, senior director of talent acquisition at Siemens. But, just how well do military tech skills translate to private-sector IT? Computerworld spoke to veterans to find out just what they learned during their tours of duty and how hard it was to transition to the civilian workforce."

Comments

Military technical skills translate very well n=1

[GAATTC]

In our Biology department we have a high end confocal microscope. This is a very expensive, sophisticated and complicated microscope with complex optical, mechanical, and control systems. The technician who services it and keeps it running was a sonar technician in a submarine for many years before he got a job working on microscopes. He is very good - logical, careful, and responsible. Obviously this is a small sample size but if his training in the navy has anything to do with his performance in his current job then this is a nice example of military training actually translating well into a civilian technology position.

Re:Military technical skills translate very well n

[LWATCDR]

Submariners tend to be very good on the average. It comes down to the fact that they live in roughly a 1000' long steel pipe under water with a nuclear reactor, high explosives, and on SSBNs a hundred plus nuclear war heads sitting on 24 big honking rockets. Mistakes are very costly in that environment :)