Mission: Family: Portable-jobs program may give spouses a long-awaited leg up - Air Force Community, Air Force Spouse and Family Resources - Air Force Times

Mission: Family: Portable-jobs program may give spouses a long-awaited leg up

For decades, spouses often have hidden their military background from potential employers, fearing bias against them.

Employers might be reluctant to hire and train someone who probably will move within the next few years, for example.

For many, that background can be impossible to hide when résumé notations bounce from Lawton, Okla., to Washington, D.C., to Killeen, Texas.

My hope is that this is all being turned on its head, and that employers will be clamoring to hire military spouses into portable jobs — portable careers — under the new Military Spouse Employment Partnership.

At www.msepjobs.com, there are thousands of job listings of all shapes and sizes, from 72 participating employers.

The Defense Department plucked a successful seven-year-old Army program and expanded it to include all military spouses, including the Coast Guard, National Guard and reserves.

Family advocates have long sought this expansion — and participating partner companies asked for it. Many of these businesses have hired spouses from the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard; their numbers just weren’t tracked.

To change perceptions will require more than this one program, acknowledged Robert Gordon, deputy assistant defense secretary for military community and family policy. But it’s part of the aim of the “Joining Forces” initiative, he said.

The nonprofit and entertainment communities also are making efforts to turn that perception around. Joining Forces engages the nation on military community issues, and highlights areas where support is needed. But it also highlights the assets of military communities and talks about “leveraging their strengths,” Gordon said.

That includes military spouses — flexible, adaptive and resilient, highly educated, responsible, mature and loyal, strong team members who are efficient and effective under pressure, with an unparalleled work ethic, states DoD’s brochure urging employers to join the partnership.

Employment has been a well-known problem area for spouses going back decades. How can Gordon offer assurances that this program will work? For one thing, it already has a proven record. Gordon noted that more than 100,000 Army spouses have been hired in the past seven years, as participating employers grew to a total of 57. MSEP now has 72 employers on board, with another 200 waiting to be vetted by DoD.

It’s not about special treatment. It’s about helping some of the best employees in the country connect with employers who want to hire them and keep them.

Let me know about your experiences, either with the new program or the previous Army initiative.