NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Staff Sgt. Robert Sabatini spent the past year in Afghanistan with an Arkansas Army National Guard agriculture development team.
Now, the Siloam Springs resident is back home and looking for work in the private sector.
Sabatini, a father of six, volunteered to be deployed with his unit to Afghanistan knowing it meant giving uphis full-time job as a coordinator for the National Guard’s Military Funeral Honors program.
“I was ready for a new challenge then,” Sabatini said. “Now I’m back and ready for a different challenge.”
Part of that challenge, Sabatini has discovered, has been trying match his specialized military experience to civilian job openings.
Such difficulty is not uncommon for veterans returning from western Asia, said Gary Wellesley, state junior vice commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars and a veteran of the Vietnam War.
Today’s veterans are returning to a more welcoming social climate than those coming back from Vietnam, but they’re also finding a tight job market, Wellesley said.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for veterans who’ve served since 2001has remained higher than for non-veterans.
The nation as a whole ended 2011 with an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent, while in December the unemployment rate for veterans serving since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was 13.1 percent, according to the labor bureau’s website.
Sabatini is one of the roughly 9,000 Arkansas guardsmen who were deployed toAfghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait since 2001. Now with the war in Iraq over, many guardsmen are coming home and going through a 90-day “reintegration” program that includes employment assistance.
Maj. Chris Heathscott, spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard, said the last members of the 77th Theater Aviation Brigade returned to Arkansas in time for Christmas.
Heathscott said Dec. 20 marked the first time since 2000 that all of Arkansas’ guard units have been home.
Part of the reintegration program for returning guardsmen includes working with representatives of the Department of Defense’s Employer Support of the Guard and Reserves.
Richard Green of the Employer Support group’s Arkansas branch said the organization recently launched the Hero 2 Hired, or H2H, program.
The program provides an online job bank at h2h. jobs where veterans seeking employment can match their skills to civilian job opportunities throughout the United States.
Matching a soldier’s military specialty to a civilian job can be difficult, Green said.
Before he retired, Green was senior enlisted adviser in the Air National Guard, but he said that title probably wouldn’t have meant much to most civilian employers.
“If I said senior enlisted adviser, they’d get this ‘deer in the headlight’ look,” Green said. “What I can tell them is I was a consultant to the commander of the Air National Guard and they’d understand it.”
Sabatini said he’s working on how to best communicate to civilian recruiters the job experience he’s amassed during 11 years in the Arkansas Army National Guard, which included deployment to Iraq.
During his deployment in Afghanistan, Sabatini was a convoy commander of an agricultural development team. The job involved planning and directing convoys and setting up and securing perimeters where agricultural seminars were held.
Sabatini said the work was similar to that of a logistics manager’s position. A check of the h2h.jobs site shows more than 2,000 jobs across the United States matching the expertise of a transportation management coordinator.
Another site that recommends jobs based on a veteran’s occupational specialty is the Veterans Job Bank at nationalresourcedirectory.gov.
The site was created after President Barack Obama in August challenged the private sector to hire or train 100,000 unemployed veterans or their spouses by the end of 2013.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s walmartcareerswithamission.com is also part of a growing number of veteran job sites on the Internet.
Spokesman Phillip Keene said the corporation has other initiatives intended to help alleviate employment concerns for veterans and members of the military.
One such program is the corporation’s Military Family Promise, which guarantees any Wal-Mart employee a comparable job at his new location if a military reassignment means the employee has to move. Another benefit of the transfer program is that it allows military spouses to build careers with Wal-Mart, Keene said.
He said the company also participates in job fairs for veterans and has long sought to attract veterans to leadership roles with the company.
“Our relationship and support goes back to the day we first opened our doors,” Keene said.
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Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/09/2012