About 200,000 people leave the U.S. military every year, according to Department of Defense figures cited by the Government Accountability Office in 2019. That is a steady, predictable stream of adults who have spent years following documented procedures, working inside strict safety systems, and getting qualified on equipment before touching it. For a manufacturer, a defense contractor, or a regulated life sciences plant, that is close to a perfect description of the person they say they cannot find. Most of them still do not get hired into those jobs.
The problem is not unemployment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the veteran unemployment rate at 3.5 percent in 2025, below the 4.2 percent rate for nonveterans. Veterans find work. The problem is what work they find. A 2022 report from the Call of Duty Endowment, drawing on Penn State’s Veterans Metrics Initiative, put veteran underemployment as high as 61 percent, and found 55 percent of veterans believe they are more experienced than their current job requires. In plain terms, a large share of the 200,000 people who leave the service each year end up in roles that use a fraction of what they know.
That is a waste on both sides, and it is a specific waste for companies that make things. The same employers who tell us a skilled technician search is taking four months are screening out people who ran maintenance programs on aircraft, operated nuclear propulsion plants, or managed munitions inventories under audit. The gap is translation, and it sits almost entirely on the employer’s side of the table.
Why the fit is real, not aspirational
Start with where veterans already work. BLS data for 2025 shows 12.0 percent of employed veterans work in manufacturing, compared with 9.0 percent of employed nonveterans. Veterans are already overrepresented on the plant floor. The pipeline exists. It is just running at a trickle compared with what it could carry.
The reason the fit works comes down to habits that are expensive to build and nearly impossible to interview for. Military training is documented training. A service member does not get qualified on a system by watching someone else do it. They train to a written standard, get signed off by a qualified instructor, and carry a record of it. Anyone who has lived through a GMP audit, an ISO surveillance visit, or a defense program review knows how rare that habit is in a civilian hire. In pharma manufacturing, federal rules require documented education, training, and experience for everyone engaged in drug production. A veteran arrives already understanding why the training record matters, which shortens the ramp and lowers the audit risk at the same time.
Safety culture is the second habit. The military runs on pre-task briefs, equipment checks, and stop-work authority. A manufacturer trying to bring down first-year injury rates, which our November 4, 2026 article, The First 90 Days as a Retention Tool, covered in detail, is hiring someone who has practiced those behaviors daily for years.
Then there is the clearance. In the defense sector, this is the most valuable thing a transitioning service member brings and the most time-sensitive. A security clearance does not expire the day someone separates. Under DoD personnel security policy, eligibility can generally be reinstated without a new investigation if the person has been out of a cleared position for no more than 24 months. Past that window, a new investigation is generally required. The 2023 edition of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Vital Signs survey found 75 percent of defense companies rated hiring workers with security clearances as somewhat or very difficult. The people who solve that problem are walking out of the service every month with the clearance already in hand, and a two-year clock already running.
The Manufacturing Institute’s Heroes MAKE America program shows what happens when the translation is done on purpose. The program trains transitioning service members on military installations for manufacturing careers. Its 2025 review reported a 92 percent graduate placement rate, average graduate salaries of 77,524 dollars, and placements with 500 companies across 49 states since 2018.
Where companies fumble
If the fit is this good, why does underemployment run so high? Three reasons show up again and again in our client conversations, and the research backs each one.
The first is resume translation. Pew Research Center’s 2019 survey of veterans found only 29 percent said their military service was very useful in giving them skills and training for a civilian job, with another 29 percent calling it fairly useful. Just 52 percent said the military prepared them well for the transition to civilian life, against 91 percent who said initial training prepared them well for military life. Military training teaches people the service’s own language. Translating it for a civilian employer is mostly left to the individual.
Employers then compound the problem with an applicant tracking system (ATS), the software that screens resumes before a human reads them, filtering on civilian job titles, and a posting that asks for five years of industry experience. A former aviation maintenance chief does not have five years of industry experience. He has twelve years of something harder.
The second is the first-job mismatch. A Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families survey of more than 1,400 veterans found that among those who left their first civilian job, nearly half left within the first year and two-thirds left within two years. The biggest obstacle they named was finding opportunities that matched their military training and experience. That survey dates to 2014, so pair it with newer data. LinkedIn’s 2023 Veteran Opportunity Report found veterans are less likely than nonveterans to leave their first job within six months. Read together, the two findings say veterans are loyal when the job uses what they know and gone when it does not. Underemployment and early attrition are the same problem viewed from two angles.
The third is the interview itself. Hiring managers hear acronyms and unit designations and quietly mark the candidate as a culture risk. Pew found 47 percent of post-9/11 veterans described their readjustment to civilian life as somewhat or very difficult. An interview built around civilian jargon, with no one in the room who can translate, turns a strong candidate into a confusing one in 45 minutes.
The pipeline that already exists
Companies do not need to build a veteran hiring program from nothing. Two are already running and both need more employers.
SkillBridge is the Department of Defense program that lets service members spend up to their final 180 days of service in an internship or training program with a civilian employer while still drawing military pay. The GAO reported that about 12,000 service members participated in the first half of fiscal 2024 alone. Roughly 83 percent were enlisted personnel, and GAO found the majority of those were in the E-4 to E-6 range, which is the mid-career technician and supervisor tier most manufacturers are short on. More than 50,000 people have gone through the program since it began in 2011.
In August 2024, DoD tightened the rules: employers must show a high probability of immediate employment, guarantee a set number of internships based on company size, and demonstrate that 75 percent or more of completers receive immediate job offers. The program now filters out companies that treat it as free labor, which makes it more valuable to the ones that take it seriously.
There is a catch. The same GAO report found DoD does not consistently collect or analyze outcome data on SkillBridge, and none of the military services had done a comprehensive analysis of whether the program is meeting participants’ needs. DoD does not currently publish outcome data an employer could use. Employers have to track their own hires, their own 90-day and one-year retention, and their own ramp times. The companies that do are the ones that keep their partner status and keep getting candidates.
Heroes MAKE America is the second pipeline, run by the Manufacturing Institute, the workforce arm of the National Association of Manufacturers. It operates on and near military installations and delivers manufacturing-specific training, including FAA airframe and powerplant programs launched in 2025 near McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas and Fort Stewart in Georgia, with a Fort Bragg program in North Carolina announced for 2026 in partnership with Fayetteville Technical Community College. The 92 percent placement rate speaks for itself. The constraint on that program is employers willing to show up at the career fairs and make offers.
What this looks like in each environment
In manufacturing, the math is simple. The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte projected in 2024 that U.S. manufacturing could need as many as 3.8 million additional workers between 2024 and 2033, and that 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled. Against that, 200,000 trained adults leave the military every year with the exact habits the plant floor rewards. A manufacturer that does not have a veteran pipeline is choosing to compete for the remaining pool with everyone else.
In defense, the clearance clock changes the urgency. An active Secret or Top Secret clearance is a depreciating asset for the first 24 months after the holder separates, and it generally takes a full re-investigation to restore after that. Defense contractors who wait for cleared candidates to appear on job boards are watching the pool drain. The move is to recruit from SkillBridge and installation career fairs before separation, when sponsorship is simple and the clearance is current.
In life sciences and other regulated plants, the win is quieter. A veteran will not know your SOPs on day one, and no one should pretend otherwise. What they will know is that the SOP exists for a reason, that the training record is not paperwork, and that a deviation gets reported, not buried. That is the hardest cultural trait to hire for in a GMP environment, and it arrives pre-installed. The ramp plan should treat SOP qualification as the structured first 90 days it already needs to be, with a qualified trainer and a visible early win.
What sophisticated employers do differently
They put a translator on the hiring team. Someone who can read a military record, usually a veteran already on staff, reviews every veteran resume before the ATS or the hiring manager does. This one step undoes most of the keyword filtering that quietly screens veterans out.
They rewrite the posting, not the candidate. “Five years of industry experience” becomes “five years maintaining complex mechanical or electrical systems to a documented standard.” The job did not change. The door got wider.
They use SkillBridge as a working interview and track their own numbers. Six months of watching someone work beats six rounds of interviews. The employers who get the most from the program commit to a set number of slots per year, name an internal owner, and measure 90-day and one-year retention themselves, because DoD does not currently track those outcomes.
They treat an active clearance like inventory with an expiration date. In defense, every cleared veteran who sits in an unrelated job for two years is a clearance the industry just lost. Recruiting before separation, through installation career fairs and transition programs, keeps the clearance current and the sponsorship simple.
They measure retention, not hires. A veteran hiring program that counts offers is measuring the wrong thing. The IVMF data says the risk window is the first two years. Companies that match the role to the training, assign a peer who speaks the language, and run a real 90-day plan keep the people they hired. Companies that treat veteran hiring as a Veterans Day press release lose them by the following summer.
What this means for boards and CEOs
First, ask for two numbers at the next operating review: how many veterans the company hired in the last 24 months, and how many are still employed. If no one can answer, that is the finding.
Second, fund one pipeline with a named owner. SkillBridge or Heroes MAKE America, pick the one closest to your sites, commit to a number of slots, and treat it as a recruiting channel with a budget and a scorecard rather than a goodwill gesture.
Third, if you operate anywhere near defense work, put the 24-month clearance window on the risk register. Cleared talent is one of the few labor pools where the supply is published in advance and the shelf life is known. Letting it lapse for lack of a recruiting process is an avoidable loss.
The military spends years building people who follow documented procedures, respect safety systems, and get qualified before they act. Then it sends 200,000 of them into the civilian market every year. The companies that make things and discover things are the natural home for that talent, and most of them are still letting it walk past. Veterans Day is a good day to post a thank-you. It is a better day to open a pipeline.
RX2 Solutions is a workforce solutions firm specializing in HR outsourcing, executive search, and strategic staffing. We partner with organizations to build high-performing teams through customized talent strategies, leadership placement, and scalable workforce solutions.
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