On a Navy ship or in corporate America, know your worth and don't settle

Fredericksburg, Va.—When Navy veteran Shawn Trisler transitioned into civilian life, he hit the job boards hard. He pumped out resumes and was first in line at job fair cattle calls at the Marriott. He was hopeful because he served 27 years in the Navy, and earned a reputation as a leader who managed shipmates with performance issues. Shawn has traveled the world and was destined to be a 30-year military man, when family life swerved in.

After some 22 years overseas, Shawn yearned to stay in one location with his wife and three children. He wanted to remain stationary so his son could play high school baseball, graduate from a school where he started and interact with U.S. college baseball recruiters. “We decided as a family that that was a great time to make that transition,” he said.

Retired in June 2015, Shawn’s Navy resume intersects with some of America’s riskiest military conflicts and operations. He was part of the naval pullout of U.S. troops from Somalia in 1994. He helped fight America’s drug war in the 90s. He seized pounds of cocaine, and blew up manufacturing facilities and aircraft runways in Key West, Florida. During the Persian Gulf War in the early 90s, he seized 54 oil vessels that violated United Nations sanctions against Iraq.

Years later he was handpicked to be operations officer for the USS Port Royal that was grounded in Pearl Harbor in 2009. The Aegis, Ticonderoga class cruiser—the pinnacle of combat operations—had run aground on a coral reef. It was a laundry list of bad news. The commanding officer had only 15 hours sleep in the previous three days, and had not been at sea in the previous five years. The GPS navigation gear was busted. The quartermaster of watch didn’t know how to take navigational fixes near the shore. Ship lookouts weren’t on watch because they were filling in as food service attendants during a manpower shortage, according to the Navy’s accident report as summarized on Navy Matters, a blog that details analysis of U.S. Navy activities. 

As operations officer, Shawn led the turnaround of the USS Port Royal, a high-profile Aegis combat cruiser that was grounded in Pearl Harbor in 2009 due to mismanagement. 

The damage to Port Royal cost millions and was a Naval embarrassment. Shawn, with a track record in managing misfits, was handpicked for the turnaround. In two years, he transformed Port Royal’s 350 personnel into one of the Navy’s best performing vessels, earning “Best in Class” three years running.

Shawn has also supervised multi-million-dollar budgets, managed technologically advanced machines and weaponry systems. He has led a remote deployed at-sea warship with a classified mission worthy of a movie script. At one point in his military career, he held the rank and authority to offensively order deployment of at-sea weaponry.

Shawn is a Navy badass. But outside on the edges of corporate America, sitting in front of recruiters, all they could see was a resume, overrun with unfamiliar work details and military lingo. “Planned, coordinated and executed nine critical ships certifications in 52 days, improved readiness from 60 to 90% and enabled the organization to deploy on time. ... As Project Manager for the Submarine Forces Continuous Training and Qualification System transition, coordinated a complete tactical operating and training system upgrade for 55 workstations and 4 simulators.”

It’s clear Shawn is management material and can execute. But job boards are designed with keyword-centric algorithms to find nearly exact matches to narrow job descriptions. Algorithms were confused by Shawn’s military resume. So were most human recruiters. His military work history is a string of 2-year stints, common for service men and women. You’re handed an assignment, get it done, move on to the next job. Recruiters didn’t seem to fully grasp his ability to ramp up fast, and lead others to the finish line.

Shawn—who in 2006 was awarded “Officer of the Year” for outstanding leadership and continuous, operational excellence among his peers of global, navy officers involved in under-sea surveillance—was offered mostly junior level cubicle jobs. Some of the work offered was plain mind-numbing. He was respectful and polite to recruiters. Inside his mind, he was handicapping how fast he could master the tasks. “Mentally, I was like, ‘I'm gonna be bored in this job in a week.’"

Many service men and women thrive in rapid decision-making. In the military, you might be merging and analyzing complex intelligence reports. Machines spit out streams of real-time, on-location data. Shi* hits the fan, and you notch into a higher gear. Out in the civilian world, Shawn craved an adrenaline rush so bad he volunteered for the police academy in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island in Washington state. He trained for nine months before serving as a reserve police officer for three years. “I did that on nights and weekends so I had that fix,” he said. “Then I was preparing mentally to be in a cubicle.” His supportive wife of 22 years, Satomi Shinohara, looked at her uniform-clad husband, his face visibly pumped. Inside her mind she was wondering, Where is this headed?

Satomi Shinohara and her husband Shawn near their home in Alexandria, Virginia.

Shawn was offered jobs with pay that wasn't commensurate with a senior military officer. “The money was equivalent to what an entry level junior manager would be receiving as maybe a 25- or a 26- year-old person. They were coming in, lowballing,” he says. “You can’t take that stuff, right?”

Managing rocks, and other leadership lessons

If you are unlucky and among shipmates who aren’t adapting and executing, your team is pegged “Stonehenge.” Your tribe is so bad it’s like the prehistoric monument in England. Your team is so bad it’s like a constellation of immobile rocks that could sink a vessel, even a warship. “They called my team Stonehenge because they were just gathering up rocks, this big circle of rocks,” he says. When Shawn recounts this story, he’s smiles big. He’s nearly gleeful because he relishes tackling a difficult problem and winning. “I liked beating people,” he said. “I liked proving that my teams were the best.” The word on the ship was, “Mr. Trisler is a pain in the ass.”

Shawn served 27 years in the Navy, 22 of them overseas. Credit: Shawn Trisler

In the Navy, he demanded high standards and had a knack for wrangling problem people. Shawn grew up poor in an Austin trailer park. Sometimes there was electricity and running water. Sometimes you’d get to stick around one place for a few months before someone called the sheriff because rent hadn’t been paid. The family sometimes lived on a 5-pound bag of potatoes for a week. “My mom could tell you every way possible to cook a potato,” he says. “And my mom was working two jobs as a waitress to feed us.”

Years later as a young man on Navy vessels, Shawn would survey his misfit cast of shipmates. He took time to understand them because he had also embarked on adulthood with a lousy hand. In some elliptical, everything-is-connected kind of way, he channeled his dysfunctional childhood and tried to identify with each human, then tailor his approach. Shawn mastered one of the first tenets of leadership. It’s not about you.

He yearned for this feeling of engaging teammates, connecting the dots and winning in corporate America. “I liked proving that my teams were the best. Whether that was an enemy, whether that was an inspection, an operation,” Shawn said. “I wanted that same kind of experience in the outside world.” But the universe had other plans.

Shawn earned a reputation managing problem shipmates. “Depending on the type of ship, sometimes you only get a week to establish yourself,” he says. Credit: Shawn Trisler

It took everything in Shawn to say “no” to his first underwhelming job offer after his Navy retirement nearly three years ago. The job was to be regional, Pacific northwest manager for a company that managed water distillation operations for customers ranging from hospitals to nuclear power plants. Managing complex workflows and large, potentially dangerous equipment. It’s easy to see why they honed in on him. But Shawn, with a family to support, took a deep breath and passed. “It was the most terrifying thing I'd ever done.”

Shawn has been working since he was 13. He was a gopher on a construction site outside Austin in the 80s. He earned $1.18 an hour doing custom moldings on expensive suburban homes. He did dry wall. Sheet rock. “I had never said ‘no’ to a job,” he said. “I took every job.”

After months of failed job searches and low-balled offers, Shawn realized he had to learn how corporate America worked, along with its less transparent pay scale. In the military, pay and job duties pretty much are in lockstep. He had to learn things like after nailing a big project or account, a manager at a for-profit company can negotiate performance-based bonuses. “Civilians have bonuses!” Shawn says.

As a 2016 U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report on hiring veterans put it, “Many veterans don’t know what they don’t know about the civilian workforce.”

In the beginning, staring down at civilian life, Shawn didn’t know what he didn’t know. So he had to learn, and started hunting for a back door into corporate America.

 The maze of a ‘sea of goodwill’

The problem here isn’t that recruiters or business leaders don’t want to help or hire veterans, service men and women and their families. There are roughly 40,000 veteran-focused nonprofits across America. And when you tabulate all organizations that serve veterans in some capacity including public, private and nonprofit groups, that number is closer to 400,000 in the U.S.

Retired Navy admiral Michael Mullen, also the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described this volume of veteran-focused groups as a “sea of goodwill” of American support. “The challenge … is how do you connect that sea of goodwill to the need?” Mullen’s comments were part of a widely shared 2010 white paper on supporting service men and women into civilian life. There was a follow-up report, “After the Sea of Goodwill,” published in 2014 by the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A key recommendation was eliminating redundancies across organizations, and encouraging cross-function collaboration.

Despite the recommendations, the transition into civilian life can be bumpier. If you graduated from college like West Point, you can tap into that network after your military retirement. If you entered service right after high school, the civilian transition is trickier. You’ve likely sat in on a few courses on resume writing and interview skills. But overall there’s a good chance you’re returning to your hometown, somewhat isolated and pretty much relying on the Internet to find a job, healthcare and housing in a digital haystack.

Internet searches for veteran groups yield pages of search engine results. It’s hard to know what to click on exactly. And when you’re new to the civilian world, every click seems like a major wrong move that might derail your life and earning power.

“Once he or she exits, it’s a maze,” says Taylor Justice, co-founder of Unite US, a veteran-owned health and human services software company that connects veterans with local public, private and nonprofit resources in their community.

There is some good news on the hiring front for service men and women. U.S. businesses rank veteran recruiting as a top three priority, behind recruitment of women and candidates with higher education, according to a 2016 report on veteran hiring by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

Andrew Price (left) and Taylor Justice are co-founders of Unite US, a software platform that connects veterans with community-specific services. Credit: Unite US

The veteran unemployment rate dropped to 2.7 percent in October this year–lower than the total U.S. unemployment rate of 4.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In recent years veterans have benefitted from recruitment efforts at corporations including Starbucks, Walmart, Goodyear and Amazon. But a straight unemployment rate can mask underemployment and labor force participation—the proportion of people employed or looking for work in the U.S. The labor force participation rate among veterans was 49.7 percent for October, lower than the total U.S. labor force participation of 62.7 percent.

Raw economic data also doesn’t reveal if veterans are finding work that fully takes advantage of their skill set. “Equally important is whether veterans are finding the right jobs,” according to the 2016 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report. “Are they finding jobs where they are fully engaged?” 

Part of the minefield for veterans is finding the right job versus any job. As a practicality, your mindset is, “Okay. I just got to maintain what I’ve got,” Shawn says. But this “just settle” mentality is unnatural for service men and women and a genuine source of tension.

“Our whole lives we are programmed and taught to excel,” says veteran Shawn. “The status quo is the worst thing can could happen to us.”

And it’s not that veterans are ungrateful for work. The reality is few Americans have served and understand a veteran’s frame of mind. Less than one-half of 1 percent of all Americans have served in the military over the past decade. There were roughly 20.4 million U.S. veterans in 2016, according to data from the Department of Veterans Affairs, representing less than 10 percent of the total U.S. adult population. Hiring managers often lack sufficient knowledge about military service and acquired skills, according to the Chamber of Commerce report that was based on two surveys.

There can be misperceptions about a veteran’s ability to adjust to a civilian work environment and whether they suffer an invisible injury like post-traumatic stress. Veterans and civilians within a company don't always mesh. Four out of five companies surveyed said they lacked formal training to help civilian employees relate to veterans. Sometimes civilians think veterans get private sector jobs as a handout of some sort.

According to one 2016 survey comment, "Sometimes, non veterans in the work place look at veterans as privileged and under qualified people who don't really deserve to be there..."

Specific challenges faced by female veterans

The transition to civilian work life can be especially hazardous for female veterans. Women can have greater difficulty landing that first post-military job compared with male peers, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce report. A major hurdle is equal pay.

Craig Bryan (left) of the National Center for Veteran Studies in Salt Lake City. Credit: AnnaBelle Bryan

In the military, there is no gender pay gap. Military pay is transparent, and men and women are paid consistently based on job, rank and years of service. “It’s public information. Everyone knows how much you’re getting paid,” says Craig Bryan, executive director of the National Center for Veteran Studies, based at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In the private sector, pay is more subjective and inconsistent.

Female veterans reported higher instances of being economically worse off after military service, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report.

Across genders and generations of veterans, a military-civilian divide persists. “We have to change the way we treat our veterans to ensure that the voluntary military is as strong as it is,” says Andrew Price, also a co-founder of Unite US. Based in New York City, their software and technology platform is now operating in 30 community regions across 16 states. “We have to change the culture,” says Price of Unite US. “Anyone can write a check.”

Defense contractors can have the upper hand

One traditional career route for veterans has been finding work with defense contractors, businesses that provide services to the military. But there are caveats, Shawn says. Defense contractor recruits are often veterans themselves so they know veterans’ salary histories. “The disadvantage for us is they know what we'll take,” Shawn says. His first corporate job out of the military in 2015 was as intelligence and security analyst at General Dynamics Information Technologies.

Shawn is frank. He details how some companies, including defense contractors, that recruit veterans know how vulnerable service men and women are as they enter the private sector. “You’re making the scariest decision of your life, to leave everything you know behind,” Shawn says. “They know you’re vulnerable at that point. They know if I offer this guy or girl this amount of money, I’m getting a person.”

Position filled. Next.

“Most of the government contractors have served, they know the mindset and how to appeal and market to veterans,” says Bryan of the National Center for Veteran Studies. It’s not that government contractors or corporations are out to get veterans. It’s about a private sector hiring process that often prioritizes efficiency. “The system isn’t necessarily geared to incentivize veterans,” he says.

Shawn scoured job boards and job fairs after military retirement. "There'd be 15 guys in a Marriott in downtown Seattle. I'd be the first person there interviewing. "

Show me the money

Veterans face a steep learning curve once they retire. It can take months if not years to find their fit and worth in the private sector. “We as military men and women are consistently undervalued,” Shawn said. “I learned very quickly that I was more highly valued than what I was being paid.” And this awareness among other factors can have wide-ranging consequences on a veterans' financial well-being, and economic security.

While there have been studies on the impact of military service on income, there’s less research on how service impacts the long-term, cumulative wealth of military veterans. A report on veteran's wealth released in November by the U.S. Census Bureau offers a glimpse into the wealth difference between veteran and nonveterans. Male veterans for some age groups are basically accumulating less wealth and are holding more credit card debt than nonveterans. (The report did not offer comparative research for female veterans.) Highlights from “The Wealth of Veterans” report include:

• For householders ages 55 to 64, veteran households had lower median net worth than their nonveteran counterparts ($160,809 compared with $232,669)
• For householders ages 35 to 44, 59 percent of veteran households had credit card debt, compared with 47.7 percent of nonveteran households.
• In the near term, some veterans face key changes to their finances. Beginning in 2018, new enlistees will be enrolled in a “Blended Retirement System,” which mixes the old military pension with participation in the “Thrift Savings Plan,” a retirement plan for federal employees that's similar to a 401(k).

Shawn manages cyber security architecture at Mallinckrodt Pharmaceutical. Their U.S. headquarters are in St. Louis.

After weeks sending out resumes cold and scanning job boards, Shawn realized personal connections and referrals get a phone call or email returned. In early summer of 2016, Shawn was invited to a retreat for Project RELO, a nonprofit group focused on educating business leaders on the value of hiring veterans. Deep in the forest in Grayling, Michigan over a campfire, Shawn met an executive and mentor, who eventually offered him a job managing cyber security architecture at Mallinckrodt Pharmaceutical. The pay was on par with a senior military officer.

Shawn got lucky in that he was recruited by a former Marine, who understood what Shawn was capable of, and helped him navigate corporate life. Shawn splits his time between his home in Virginia, and Mallinckrodt’s offices in Hampton, N.J. and U.S. headquarters in St. Louis. It’s a global company so he still travels a lot. “I’m in charge of the largest projects, multi-million dollar projects across a global organization, where I’m changing the way we are doing business globally,” he says. “I’m really happy to be here, but I’m not done yet.”

Prologue: Not better or worse, just different

It’s August and I’m trailing Shawn as he zips through the St. Louis Lambert International Airport. It’s a quick flight to Dulles International Airport in Virginia, then home to his wife and son. Food service inside an airport burger joint is slow but he barely notices. Shawn is on his cell. He’s checking in, and fired up his team is running on all cylinders.

“How are you doing? ... Great work over there. … Did we get the readers fixed? ... Awesome. Good work.” He's efficient on the phone, but genial. I know little about “readers” or a pharmaceutical giant’s cybersecurity needs. But Shawn’s enthusiasm and warmth are welcoming. I want to help out, too. “I’m in St. Louis, headed out to D.C. tonight. ... I’ll do that from there,” he says, still on the phone. “Do you have any questions on that?” The burgers and check finally arrive.     

It’s not quite three years since Shawn retired from the Navy. He’s come a long way in his transition into corporate work life. But he still has an existential crisis now and then, especially when it comes to civilians who dial it in on the job, and complain about the organization all day long. “It’s been very difficult for me to process how to deal with those types of individuals,” Shawn says. He’s legit serious. Service men and women are wired to excel every day, every task. Underachievers clog his military mind. “I’m forthright, and I’m moving this organization forward, it’s gonna be successful and that’s gonna pay me on the back end.”

For service men and women, grasping a bigger picture and mission comes naturally. It’s their comfort zone. “Veterans are really good at finding purpose and meaning because of their military experience,” veteran expert Bryan says. I’m on the phone to Salt Lake City and describing Shawn to Bryan, also a trained clinical psychologist. He says one of the initial struggles veterans face is a feeling the private sector work they do—even a growing career—is not important and lacks a larger mission. In the military, there’s a higher purpose. A collectivist culture. “Those sorts of values are not as salient within the private sector,” he says.

New veterans don’t know how to frame their civilian lives just yet. This disconnect and absence of larger purpose can lead to loneliness, depression and serious mental health problems among veterans. On the other end of the spectrum, the disconnect can trigger underemployment, unfulfilling work lives, lower worker productivity, retention and advancement.

If there’s a potential downside to military life, it’s that dramatic work experiences, and the potential pinnacle of your life, is happening in your 20s.

“We climbed Mount Everest when we were young,” says Bryan, who served in the Air Force.

His current research encompasses suicide, psychological health, and resiliency among military personnel and veterans. When Bryan is connecting with veterans, he encourages them to think less in black-and-white terms. It’s not that civilian work life is better or worse than military life. “Stay away from the 'better or worse,' ” he says. “It’s just different.”

After 22 years overseas, Shawn decided to retire from the military so his son could pursue baseball in the U.S.

It’s fall now and early evening just outside Dulles airport. Shawn has just landed after another work trip, this time from Las Vegas, and prior to that Ireland. We’re on the phone and it’s sometimes hard for me to hear him through the car’s navigation voice system, spitting out directions. He tells me he’s tired. And that Christopher just turned 18. Shawn’s two daughters Akasha, 22, and Kennedy, 21, are out of the house already. Shawn and Satomi are plotting their future once the kids are off payroll.

Soon they’ll roll the dice again. An opportunity will emerge. He'll text Satomi. She might respond as she has in the past, “Take it. Big money. Ha ha." They'll roll the dice again, and jump. “You got to make the most terrifying choices of your life,” Shawn says. “And you can’t look back.” 

Video directed by Scott Erickson, produced by Heesun Wee, filmed by Tony Cruz and Dathan Graham, edited by Chris Chan Lee.

This article is part of Work in Progress, a new series exploring what it means to earn a living today. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Google Play and see more stories at #WorkInProgress.