LABORING VETS
Veterans hiring initiative joins a crowded field of service groups
At least 50 organizations in the Pittsburgh region have declared a mission to serve veterans in some capacity, from housing assistance to education to social services. For one of the most basic — getting a job — one nonprofit has tried to distinguish itself as the model for translating military skills into high-paying employment. Corporate America Supports You helped place 161 veterans over the past year in Pittsburgh-area jobs that pay an average salary of $58,000. That’s according to the Heinz Endowments, which sought out the Missouri-based nonprofit and funded it with a $100,000 grant in July 2016.
The grant has been renewed for a second year and boosted to $150,000. The endowments also set a more ambitious target — 300 veterans in jobs with an average salary of $50,000.
The program’s free job-seeking services, in many ways, boil down to convincing both veterans and employers that it can be a natural leap from lengthy military service to working within large companies.
“The military is a big corporation,” said Stacy Bayton, senior executive vice president of the nonprofit and a veteran of
the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve and the U.S. Marine Corps. “We have departments and divisions. We’ve got public affairs. We’ve got offices all over the U.S. and abroad.”
CASY launched in 2010 to provide job-placement services and vocational training. Nationally, the nonprofit reports that it has helped place more than 100,000 veterans in jobs with an average salary of $72,000.
Though the group does much of its work through virtual services available anywhere in the country, it has stationed 61 staff members across 19 states where high demand calls for faceto-face meetings. In Pittsburgh, the Heinz Endowments set a first-year goal of placing 200 veterans in jobs with an average salary of $50,000.
In July, CASY began the difficult task of getting in the door and staying in the room with the region’s large employers. The nonprofit also contended with some disillusionment in the veteran population.
In 2016, the U.S. veteran unemployment rate of 4.3 percent was lower than the civilian rate of 4.7 percent, though labor force participation rates are much lower among veterans, meaning many don’t have jobs and aren’t looking for them.
Southwestern Pennsylvania is home to roughly 235,000 veterans and at least 50 veterans service organizations, according to a 2015 study conducted for the Heinz Endowments by the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. Just 38 percent of veterans surveyed were happy with services in the region.
For CASY, one way to stand out was to get deep in the weeds with translating military skills between veterans and employers. Gene Bradshaw, Pittsburgh’s veteran employment program manager, was recently broughton to lead the group’s effortsin the second year.
“Right now, it’s educating as many groups as I can,” he said. “On the company side, we don’t have as big a footprint as we’d like.”
Last month, Mr. Bradshaw grabbed a table next to someone representing Helmets to Hardhats — a group that connects veterans with construction trades — at a veterans career forum at the Community College of Beaver County.
The daylong forum focused on job opportunities at Royal Dutch Shell’s chemical plant, slated to begin operating as soon as 2020. Speakers described the technology to be used at the ethane cracker plant and how veterans could transfer their skills to jobs there.
“It’s really about what’s in it for them,” said Dylan Raymond, an enthusiastic veteran recruiter for Shell. “You have to know their need, so you know how to communicate how you would fix their problems.”
CASY’s work came alongside the Heinz Endowment’s messaging campaign on veteran employment over the summer. The group paid about $130,000 for advertisements on regional buses and other public places that bluntly urged employers to hire veterans instead of simply thanking them for their service.
For Tony Canzonieri, a U.S. Army veteran, there came a time recently when he realized he had never left the military mindset. Enlisting at age 17, he went to work for veterans service organizations when he left the military in 2008.
Through his work with veterans groups, he found CASY, which walked him through the corporate structure, even drawing a new organizational tree with new labels such as changing “vice president” to “colonel.”
Further, the group cosponsored five days of training with IBM for Mr. Canzonieri to become a certified data analyst, which helped him get a job at McKesson Corp.’s offices in Green Tree as a data operations manager. After a few months, he left that job and went to work in the registrar’s office at Point Park University in Downtown.
Both jobs paid less than $35,000 a year, he said.
Just this month, he took a much higher-paying job with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Downtown, where he provides administrative support to senior staff at the professional services giant.
“Civilian applications are a lot different,” he said. “You really have to talk yourself up. CASY helped me out with that.”