For those that follow HKY4Vets, I suspect you might be growing accustomed to these somewhat longer "dry spells" with no updates (outside of our social media outlets).
Always know when we go a tad bit quiet, it usually means we are really deep into making some really cool things happen - hopefully to the benefit of transitioning military, military families and our awesome HKY4Vets business partners. True to form, we are in that quietly, crazily active period right now.
I thought I might preview a little bit of the happenings in anticipation.
The short version is - HKY4Vets is actively working to establish the HKY4Vets Industry Fellows program, up to a 3-month internship program available to military and military spouse talent within their last 180 days of active duty service.
We believe such a program would be extremely beneficial for Service members seeking to gain valuable civilian work experience (often a barrier during transition), while providing our HKY4Vets Talent Connect Partners access to the world's most highly trained and motivated workforce at no cost (yep, Uncle Sam is still paying the Service Member).
Seems like a valuable win/win for all involved, right?
To get this awesome and worthwhile program off the ground, we will be working with some awesome partners from Soldier for Life (SFL-TAP) & the Career Resource Center at Fort Bragg to become an approved Department of Defense's SkillBridge Program.
The DOD SkillBridge Program is a growing, national effort to assist Service Members transition from their military paycheck to civilian paycheck without skipping a beat.
To date there are more than 125 SkillBridge programs across the country - in everything from pipe fitting, software development to farming. To this point though, most of those programs have been limited to communities and companies either near-base or on-base, somewhat due to a service member's personal logistics to an actual rule that limited the program to a 50 mile radius.
But the 50 mile rule is gone now - and the boundaries are effectively the entire country for companies (or communities like ours, 3 hours or so hours down the road from Bragg) that want to establish such a program. We even learned during a recent visit to Fort Bragg, they have active duty Soldiers from Ft. Bragg currently interning in San Francisco, thousands of miles away!
There is surely tons of work ahead of HKY4Vets to pull this together and many, many partners that will have to play an active role in making this a success, but we are confident this is a very worthwhile pursuit to better connect our country's top talent directly with our Catawba County community.
Our goal right now (with all of this work and many questions ahead) is to welcome our 1st cohort of HKY4Vets Fellows in Spring 2020, with a follow-up cohort in Fall 2020. We may only initial get a small handful of interested participants out of the gate, but our hope is to eventually have 8-10 Fellows participating each session.
If you would like to learn more about this program or some of the finer details being discussed, please feel free to always reach out to us via info@hky4vets.com.
ABOUT THE DOD SKILLBRIDGE PROGRAM
The DoD SkillBridge program is an opportunity for Service members to gain valuable civilian work experience through specific industry training, apprenticeships, or internships during the last 180 days of service. SkillBridge connects Service members with industry partners in real-world job experiences. For Service members SkillBridge provides an invaluable chance to work and learn in civilian career areas. For industry partners SkillBridge is an opportunity to access and leverage the world’s most highly trained and motivated workforce at no cost. Service members participating in SkillBridge receive their military compensation and benefits, and industry partners provide the training and work experience. Learn more here.
