America's largest wartime veterans organization signed a memorandum of understanding
August 26, 2014
America's largest wartime veterans organization signed a memorandum of understanding here Aug. 25 with the country's foremost provider of online services to veterans and servicemembers.
The agreement enables The American Legion to feature a portal on its website that will include the Military Skills Translator (MST) developed by Military.com, along with other job-related services provided by its parent company, Monster.com.
"The American Legion is getting access to an extremely powerful job-search tool that is normally sold to private-sector corporations," said American Legion National Commander Daniel M. Dellinger. "Military.com has put a great deal of R &D into their Military Skills Translator, which is state-of-the-art and the premiere job-search tool out there for the military community to use."
A new American Legion landing page is planned for launching at www.legion.org within the next 45 days, according to the agreement. The MST for that page was developed specifically for users with Armed Forces experience.
A team from Monster and Military.com went through the job descriptions, matching them with major career fields in the private sector, examining resumes of successful job applicants, and determining the most important skills for each civilian job.
"When users type their military job titles into the MST, they see not only familiar skills listed," said Terry "T" McCreary, president of Military.com. "But hopefully it will draw out skills they weren't necessarily aware of - for instance, the skills of a transportation specialist include logistics and risk management.
"We wanted to develop a tool that would help people go beyond their own impression of what their abilities were, dig deeper into their work experience and expand the number of career possibilities for them."
The MST also taps into the Monster.com database of all job openings that require an individual's skills; each portal user gets a "live" list of all the jobs they could apply for in the private sector - jobs that are weighted in favor of training and experience gained in the military.
The landing page will also include a link to Military.com's Transition Center, which provides services and information designed to help servicemembers re-enter the civilian world.
Dellinger said with the addition of Military.com's powerful online tools, "The American Legion now has the opportunity to link our members, and anyone who uses our website, to a state-of-the-art job-search engine and the largest available database of job openings."
"There are a lot of skills translators out there, but we think we've developed the best one for the military community," McCreary said. "Being involved and associated with The American Legion is important to Military.com in continuing to be a resource for veterans and military families."
