During a 2010 passenger flight from Seattle to Los Angeles, Edge4Vets founder Tom Murphy was sitting next to a uniformed US Army soldier. Before the gate closed, the young man started drinking to mask his anxieties and anything else he might be struggling with.
His behavior alarmed the flight crew, who escorted him out of the flight. The soldier’s behavior didn’t bother Murphy, but the underlying cause did. While on the flight, he wrote an article for the New York Post about what Americans could do to return American troops.
Murphy never served, but he wanted to do something on his own. So he created a training method to teach veterans how to translate the skills they acquired in military service into the language spoken by the civilian workforce.
“They sometimes have a hard time selling themselves,” Murphy said at an Edge4Vets conference in South Carolina. “People who serve in the military learn to work as a team and sometimes don’t think in terms of their individual accomplishments and sets of skills.”
Murphy is the founder of Fordham University’s Human Resilience Institute, which conducts research and provides training to help aviation workers cope with the pressures of one of the most demanding career fields in the world.
In 2011, he founded Edge4Vets in conjunction with HRI to offer similar assistance to military veterans. The program combines workshop training with online instruction to teach veterans how to turn their military experience into skills for the business workforce and then connect them to jobs. Often, the program offers guidance in the fields that veterans are trying to enter.
“Edge4Vets gives veterans and other military personnel the support that business leaders say they need most; that is, we teach them how to translate their military strengths, including values and skills, into tools for success in the civilian workplace, so we connect them to jobs that can lead to careers, ”said Murphy in a statement.
Murphy estimates that eight out of 10 veterans who participate in Edge4Vets workshops have ensured sustainable employment after training. In all, the group helped more than 2,000 veterans in seven states to find work.
Rich Horan, a US Army veteran who served as an infantry team leader in Afghanistan, is one of those veterans. Infantry is one of the most difficult career fields for veterans when trying to apply their military training to the civilian workforce.
“Edge4Vets helped me to identify the value of this skill – my ability to form teams – and present it in a way that companies could see the value that I could add,” said Horan in a press release.
Like many other nonprofit organizations and programs, Edge4Vets has changed some of its training opportunities to online formats. The next online training workshop is scheduled for April 15, 2021, at 1 pm Eastern time. A follow-up session is scheduled for April 30th.
During the two-week break between sessions, participants can access the Edge4Vets online course through a series of videos and exercises. Interested veterans can register for the Zoom-based workshop on the Edge4Vets website.
– Blake Stilwell can be reached at [email protected]. It can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.
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