Our project highlights the interconnectivity of many Army occupations in regard to the set of skills that their occupants acquire. We analyzed skill acquisition according to three skill types: baseline, software, and specialized. These are classifications defined by Burning Glass. Baseline skills refer to those that are common across all industries and are commonly referred to as "soft skills." Software skills are those pertaining to technical abilities. Lastly, specialized skills are those niche skills that are specific to a specific industry or job.
Through our analysis of baseline skills, we found that many veterans possess an overlapping set of skills, most prevalently communication skills, physical abilities, and organizational skills. Our exploratory data analysis shows that these skills are indeed sought out among civilian jobs and for this reason should be included on veterans' resumes. Existing literature supports these findings and shows that veterans are in fact being hired due to the baseline skills they possess.
Having examined the dataset further, we noticed there are a number of skills unique to one or few Army jobs. Some of the rarest baseline skills include Notepad, AppleWorks, and Omnipage Pro, which each only show up in one MOS. Contrastingly, skills such as proficiency in Urdu, Pashto, and Greek show up in more MOSs but are still considered to be unique being that they are not found in all 10 Army jobs.
With all baseline skills considered (unique and non-unique), our research indicates Army personnel possess necessary skills that would enable them to fill on average 185,900 jobs within each SOC code with an average salary of $51,000.
In addition to these baseline skills, we examined software and specialized skills acquired through the Army. Of the software skills, being able to use SAP, Facebook, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, and Salesforce were the most frequently occurring. Of the set of specialized skills, we found that cleaning, teamwork/collaboration, repair, lifting ability, and scheduling were the most frequently occurring (though there is not too much difference between the top 10 specialized skills). Overall however, many of the top skills regardless of skill type were still baseline skills (communication skills, detail-oriented, English, problem solving, organizational skills, teamwork/collaboration, etc.), emphasizing the importance of these baseline skills.
Lastly, with the goal of highlighting the potential benefit or hinderance of skills acquired through Army jobs, we conducted a case study in which we compared Army SOC codes to non-Army SOC codes within the healthcare industry.
As to be expected, some skills required within the healthcare industry are not acquired through the Army. For example, baseline skills such as Plan Revision and proficiency in Welsh and Irish were unmatched to the Army SOC codes. Having weighted these skills by employment, however, these skills show up so infrequently within the healthcare industry that a veteran's unfamiliarity with Welsh, for example, is not necessarily detrimental. Contrarily, specialized and software skills showed greater employment weights. Skills of these types not acquired through Army jobs include test interpretation, organ systems, and pulmonary embolism (specialized) as well as mobile application design and LabVIEW (software). Overall, these findings indicate potential gaps in veterans' knowledge or skillset when transitioning from an Army job to civilian job in the healthcare industry. Of the previously mentioned skills, many directly pertain to medical teaching which, unlike a baseline skill, an individual may have greater difficulty acquiring outside of the field in which they need them.
Still, in the end, we found overlap between Army jobs and the healthcare industry in that they both shared skills such as communication skills (baseline), Facebook (software), teamwork/collaboration (specialized), and scheduling (specialized) among others. This overlap highlights that while occupations within the Army and healthcare industry may vary greatly, there are nevertheless similarities in the skills required for each of them. This is relevant to our broader discussion of veterans' transition from military to civilian life in that it shows veterans may acquire skills through the Army that can help them matriculate into the healthcare industry after service.